I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.
— Henry David Thoreau
I cannot read a single word of the Hindoos without being elevated.
Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed... Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.
There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.
I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.
The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.
May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!
It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.
They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.
The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.
An unclean person is universally a slothful one.
Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks.
Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.
I have the habit of attention to such excess, that my senses get no rest - but suffer from a constant strain.
We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.
We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.
So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.
I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.
Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.
It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of today.
In the meanest are all the materials of manhood, only they are not rightly disposed.
After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.
God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.
It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.
Some are reputed sick and some are not. It often happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder.
Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.
Every day or two, I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.
How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact!
To be awake is to be alive.
If an injustice requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the government machine.
The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?
How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.
I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while.
Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.
We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.
Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.
Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.
I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.
Every people have gods to suit their circumstances.
Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.
Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.
Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.
