Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreauwas an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Resistance to Civil Government, an argument for disobedience to an unjust state...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth12 July 1817
CountryUnited States of America
life art life-is
The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.
life beautiful past
Life is grand, and so are its environments of Past and Future. Would the face of nature be so serene and beautiful if man's destiny were not equally so?
life thinking two
Four things to think about. 1. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. 2. Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred. 3. Keep three chairs in your house. One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. 4. To preserve your relationship to nature, make your life more moral, more pure, more innocent.
life would-be afternoon
If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I'm sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.
life imagination criticism
However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the lay, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.
life cat men
The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.
life men want
Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.
strength swamps woods
When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a Sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.
strength men world
It is very rare that you meet with obstacles in this world, which the humblest man has not faculties to surmount.
friendship treats surface
Treat your friends for what you know them to be. Regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did, but what they intended.
friendship doe use
Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last? No! no! it is the poet: he it is who makes the truest use of the pine-who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane. . . .
appreciation class appreciate
Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.
appreciation appreciate virtue
The virtue which we appreciate, we to some extent appropriate.
communication saint manners
Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.