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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1b8393f | Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| d609807 | Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows that surround it. We need the tonic of wildness... | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| b73673d | We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with Nature. He has glances of starry recognition to which our saloons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying li.. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| a1ba970 | Thu luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. | class-struggle | Henry David Thoreau | |
| aa5d167 | No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 3e14e07 | Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still entirely unknown. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 6f44317 | There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains its maxims. It has no temple nor even a solitary column...However, out fates at least are social. Our courses do not diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the centre. Men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly foretell it. We are.. | friendship humanity kinship love | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 318dfeb | Ich ging in die Walder, weil ich bewusst leben wollte. | leben natur tod | Henry David Thoreau | |
| dd2f01d | Any man will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and classbooks, and when we leave school, the Little Reading, and story books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, a.. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| fab3765 | There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of 'expediency.' There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals, the only sliders are backsliders. | politics | Henry David Thoreau | |
| e0071ff | This man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have lived. Perchance he is not confounded by many knowledges, and has not sought out many inventions, but how to take many fishes before the sun sets, with slender birchen pole and flaxen line, that is invention enough for him. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 464e06d | When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now.. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 87099bb | The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| aa2756c | Morning brings back the heroic ages. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 9bbd844 | It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 0dc1527 | It's not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?" --Henry David Thoreau" | Brian P. Moran | ||
| 349e490 | 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; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a m.. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| dfd93de | There is a low mist in the woods-- It is a good day to study lichens. | mycology nature | Henry David Thoreau | |
| e056ebe | Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 6738572 | If then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become of the worthies of the world. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 7dcc2f4 | How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 26a7cba | It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 6314cd9 | Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 1dc1eeb | I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| aeebc20 | As yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of today is present, so some flitting perspectives and demi-experiences of the life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside to time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 16768f0 | When he read James Wilkinson's book The Human Body in 1851, Thoreau was impressed. "Wilkinson's book," he wrote in his journal, "to some extent realizes what I have dreamed of, -a return to the primitive analogical and derivative sense of words. His ability to trace analogies often leads to a truer word than more remarkable writers have found.... The faith he puts in old and current expressions as having sprung from an instinct wiser than s.. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| a8954b5 | If it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. Such was that part of creation where I had squatted; | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| e35e13a | Sure there are poets which did never dream Upon Parnassus, nor did taste the stream Of Helicon; we therefore may suppose Those made not poets, but the poets those. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| aec3b82 | There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. will then be the only slaves. | behavior justice politics slavery voting | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 0774a8d | How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. --HENRY DAVID THOREAU | Josh Kaufman | ||
| 5c9f1ec | Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. DuBois, and Lyndon B. Johnson are just a few of the famous Americans who taught. They resisted the fantasy of educators as saints or saviors, and understood teaching as a job in which the potential for children's intellectual transcendence and social mobility, though always present, is limited by real-world concerns such as poor training, low pay, inadequate supplies, inept administration, and.. | teaching | Dana Goldstein | |
| 68527c3 | Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 242506d | The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit--not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 38e8b31 | The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. | governments law slavery | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 5ee0915 | In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 86c8fe4 | There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| cc5d0e3 | The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? | empathy human-nature life miracle stars walden walden-pond | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 776d53b | and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 756c51f | If a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are subjects of shame." No:" | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 70f782c | This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| c26ccc4 | But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party." | society solitude | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 8b4e550 | This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 725e6dc | It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal .. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| db6d506 | It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her--the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. | Henry David Thoreau |