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
men majority-rule justice
But government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.
years christ reincarnation
I lived in Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries.
truth truth-is paradoxical
Truth is always paradoxical.
remember reincarnation states
As far back as I can remember I have unconsciously referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence.
clothes coats flesh
Why should we be startled by death? Life is a constant putting off of the mortal coil - coat, cuticle, flesh and bones, all old clothes.
boys mediocrity temples
The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.
life creativity men
In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.
dream bogs wilderness
It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.
men government advantage
Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.
government people liable
The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.
writing hands given
The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands.
writing gusto wells
We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto.
reading library nine
I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.
life religious kings
I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching-thang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again."