3,409 Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.

O for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through!

I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone.

The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.

Bankruptcy and repudiation are the spring-boards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine

A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work.

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let our affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand...Simplify, simplify!

Thu luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another.