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
heartbreak grieving wonder
What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?
morning spring health
Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and Spring.
happiness strong law
What wisdom, what warning can prevail against gladness? There is no law so strong that a little gladness may not transgress.
happiness life-happiness broads
I love the broad margin to my life.
happiness morning evening
The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.
lying future insanity
If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies.
faith spring men
The mason asks but a narrow shelf to spring his brick from; man requires only an infinitely narrower one to spring his arch of faith from.
education brooks
Education makes a straight ditch of a free meandering brook.
being-happy cost given
The cost of a thing is something called life which is given in exchange for it.
time people moles
How earthy old people become --moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.
dream time memories
We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.
opportunity thinking giving
The true and not despairing Friend will address his Friend in some such terms as these. "I never asked thy leave to let me love thee,--I have a right. I love thee not as something private and personal, which is your own, but as something universal and worthy of love, which I have found. O, how I think of you! You are purely good, --you are infinitely good. I can trust you forever. I did not think that humanity was so rich. Give me an opportunity to live.
realizing ends
Don't get to the end of your life and realize you have never lived.
flower yesterday bird
My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting.