Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?

Henry David Thoreau

Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? Or declared by any number of men to be good, if they are NOT good?

Henry David Thoreau

The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.

Henry David Thoreau

That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

Henry David Thoreau

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.

Henry David Thoreau

He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

Henry David Thoreau

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails - aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter's reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.

Henry David Thoreau

A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it.

Henry David Thoreau

But government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.

Henry David Thoreau

Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.

Henry David Thoreau

To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

Henry David Thoreau

I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention. Man is but the place where I stand, and the prospect hence is infinite.

Henry David Thoreau

What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.

Henry David Thoreau

It is the man determines what is said, not the words.

Henry David Thoreau

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone... I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave.

Henry David Thoreau

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

Henry David Thoreau

When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?

Henry David Thoreau

The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor

Henry David Thoreau

Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid.

Henry David Thoreau

No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes: yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.

Henry David Thoreau

I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.

Henry David Thoreau

The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.

Henry David Thoreau

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

Henry David Thoreau

I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

Henry David Thoreau

Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

Henry David Thoreau

To be awake is to be completely alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.

Henry David Thoreau

A man can suffocate on courtesy.

Henry David Thoreau

Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmie that he can? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made

Henry David Thoreau

No man ever followed his genius til it misled him.

Henry David Thoreau

In the meanest are all the materials of manhood, only they are not rightly disposed.

Henry David Thoreau

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

Henry David Thoreau

Some are reputed sick and some are not. It often happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder.

Henry David Thoreau

How can any man be weak who dares to be at all?