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
years silence three
I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.
self sobriety society
Sobriety, severity, and self-respect are the foundations of all true sociality.
suicide believe suicidal
Do not despair of life. Think of the fox, prowling in a winter night to satisfy his hunger. His race survives; I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.
intelligent giving intelligence
We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.
educational inheritance born
To inherit property is not to be born - it is to be still-born, rather.
educational would-be students
We should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.
patriotic sacrifice self
Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.
flower heaven earth
Nature is fair in proportion as the youth is pure. The heavens and the earth are one flower ; the earth is the calyx, the heavens the corolla.
loneliness men thinking
You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.
government liberty authority
The authority of government . . . can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.
men years liberty
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.
life dog men
As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
men liberty world
When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?
friendship cute take-me
My friend is one... who take me for what I am.