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Quuotes of Henry David Thoreau
"The language of friendship is not words but meanings."
"That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest."
"Talk of mysteries! Think of our lives in Nature -- daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world!"
–Henry David Thoreau
The period between midnight and dawn is the best time to look for shooting stars. On a normal night you can see between five and ten an hour. In a desert, you can see one every eight minutes.
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all.
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Me thinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls
It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work.
It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Good for the body is the work of the body, and good for the soul is the work of the soul, and good for either is the work of the other.
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
" In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial."
The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absences but in the mastery of his passions."
He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.
"Do not be too moral, you may cheat yourself out of so much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good: be good for something."
Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.
Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize the infinite extent of our relations.
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint.... What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.
Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; he will
live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.
To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air. What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these apples might be labeled, “To be eaten in the wind.” It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit. . . The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England. I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor soul, there are many pleasures which you will not know! . . . the end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel.
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