Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?... We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

Henry David Thoreau

I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once moreonly the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,--those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.

Henry David Thoreau

A strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man's door, and utter their complaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it.

Henry David Thoreau

Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man.

Henry David Thoreau

Perhaps anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men and five negroes were concerned in the late enterprise; but their very anxiety to prove this might suggest to themselves that all is not told. Why do they still dodge the truth? They are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. They at most only criticise the tactics.

Henry David Thoreau

Nothing can shock a brave man but dullness.

Henry David Thoreau

Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection.

Henry David Thoreau

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Henry David Thoreau

As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.

Henry David Thoreau

There is more religion in men's science, than there is science in their religion.

Henry David Thoreau

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

Henry David Thoreau

It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town... he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety.

Henry David Thoreau

The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.

Henry David Thoreau

It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.

Henry David Thoreau

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

Henry David Thoreau

A man may esteem himself happy when that which is his food is also his medicine.

Henry David Thoreau

When a man truly commits, the universe will conspire to assure his success.

Henry David Thoreau

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.

Henry David Thoreau

An ordinary man will work every day for a year at shoveling dirt to support his body, or a family of bodies; but he is an extraordinary man who will work a whole day in a year for the support of his soul. Even the priests, men of God, so called, for the most part confess that they work for the support of the body.

Henry David Thoreau

Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up.

Henry David Thoreau

All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.

Henry David Thoreau

Wherever men have lived, there is a story to be told

Henry David Thoreau

It is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning.

Henry David Thoreau

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

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders.

Henry David Thoreau

A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it.

Henry David Thoreau

Poetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when he has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes.

Henry David Thoreau

Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

Henry David Thoreau

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

Henry David Thoreau

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

Henry David Thoreau

A man's interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.

Henry David Thoreau

Law never made men a whit more just.

Henry David Thoreau

If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.