3,409 Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

In the long run, you hit only what you aim at.

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

I am a citizen of the world first, and of this country at a later and more convenient hour.

Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.

I was determined to know beans.

It is so rare to meet with a man outdoors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands. Behind every man's busy-ness there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and industry, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it above the surface.

We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.

I see in many places little barberry bushes just come up densely in the cow-dung, like young apple trees, the berries having been eaten by the cows. Here they find manure and an open space for the first year at least, when they are not choked by grass or weeds. In this way, evidently, many of these clumps of barberries are commenced.