Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open.

Henry David Thoreau

Wherever you may seek solitude, men will ferret you out and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows.

Henry David Thoreau

In an unjust society the only place for a just man is prison.

Henry David Thoreau

Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.

Henry David Thoreau

Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

Henry David Thoreau

Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.

Henry David Thoreau

Man's moral nature is a riddle which only eternity can solve.

Henry David Thoreau

Man is but the place where I stand ...

Henry David Thoreau

Where shall we look for standard English, but to the words of a standard man?

Henry David Thoreau

I do not judge men by anything they can do. Their greatest deed is the impression they make on me.

Henry David Thoreau

It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain.

Henry David Thoreau

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

Henry David Thoreau

A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as this brain.

Henry David Thoreau

To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.

Henry David Thoreau

Most men, it seems to me, do not care for Nature and would sell their share in all her beauty, as long as they may live, for a stated sum - many for a glass of rum. Thank God, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!

Henry David Thoreau

I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!

Henry David Thoreau

There are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or inlet, yet unexplored by him.

Henry David Thoreau

Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. ... Shall we always study to obtain more, and not sometimes be content with less?

Henry David Thoreau

I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men. The former are so much the freer.

Henry David Thoreau

It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience, but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.

Henry David Thoreau

Bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy.

Henry David Thoreau

From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may be reason for a savage's preferring many kinds of food which the civilized man rejects. The former has the palate of an outdoor man. It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.

Henry David Thoreau

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.

Henry David Thoreau

The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.

Henry David Thoreau

If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.

Henry David Thoreau

When I hear a grown man or woman say, "Once I had faith in men, now I have not," I am inclined to ask, "Who are you whom the world has disappointed? Have not you rather disappointed the world?"

Henry David Thoreau

The man of genius knows what he is aiming at; nobody else knows. And he alone knows when something comes between him and his object. In the course of generations, however, men will excuse you for not doing as they do, if you will bring enough to pass in your own way.

Henry David Thoreau

How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden.

Henry David Thoreau

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks where the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets.

Henry David Thoreau

As a man thinks of himself, so he is.

Henry David Thoreau

The words of some men are thrown forcibly against you and adhere like burrs.

Henry David Thoreau

I was daily intoxicated, yet no man could call me intemperate.

Henry David Thoreau

We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches.