Top 500 Henry David Thoreau Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “No man ever followed his genius til it misled him.”

— Henry David Thoreau

452. “The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.”

— Henry David Thoreau

453. “Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.”

— Henry David Thoreau

454. “What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own.”

— Henry David Thoreau

455. “The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.”

— Henry David Thoreau

456. “Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.”

— Henry David Thoreau

457. “In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.”

— Henry David Thoreau

458. “The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must bestripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living laid for a foundation.”

— Henry David Thoreau

459. “To regret deeply is to live afresh.”

— Henry David Thoreau

460. “We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste.”

— Henry David Thoreau

461. “No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow.”

— Henry David Thoreau

462. “When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.”

— Henry David Thoreau

463. “You must ascend a mountain to learn your relation to matter, and so to your own body, for it is at home there, though you are not.”

— Henry David Thoreau

464. “Nature spontaneously keeps us well. Do not resist her!”

— Henry David Thoreau

465. “Who looks in the sun will see no light else; but also he will see no shadow. Our life revolves unceasingly, but the centre is ever the same, and the wise will regard only the seasons of the soul.”

— Henry David Thoreau

466. “To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.”

— Henry David Thoreau

467. “If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.”

— Henry David Thoreau

468. “The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.”

— Henry David Thoreau

469. “The chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground, and rising through the house to the heavens; evenafter the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent.”

— Henry David Thoreau

470. “Most men, it seems to me, do not care for Nature and would sell their share in all her beauty, as long as they may live, for a stated sum – many for a glass of rum. Thank God, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!”

— Henry David Thoreau

471. “Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her.”

— Henry David Thoreau

472. “There is more religion in men’s science, than there is science in their religion.”

— Henry David Thoreau

473. “When the true criminals are running around free, the only honorable place for a decent human being is in prisons.”

— Henry David Thoreau

474. “Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always. Every house is, in this sense, a hospital.”

— Henry David Thoreau

475. “Then at night the general stillness is more impressive than any sound, but occasionally you hear the note of an owl farther or nearer in the woods, and if near a lake, the semihuman cry of the loons at their unearthly revels.”

— Henry David Thoreau

476. “Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are constantly being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.”

— Henry David Thoreau

477. “Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses; but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes.”

— Henry David Thoreau

478. “I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.”

— Henry David Thoreau

479. “When I hear a grown man or woman say, “Once I had faith in men, now I have not,” I am inclined to ask, “Who are you whom the world has disappointed? Have not you rather disappointed the world?””

— Henry David Thoreau

480. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

— Henry David Thoreau

481. “In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead.”

— Henry David Thoreau

482. “Concord River is remarkable for the gentleness of its current, which is scarcely perceptible, and some have referred to its influence the proverbial moderation of the inhabitants of Concord, as exhibited in the Revolution, and on later occasions.”

— Henry David Thoreau

483. “There never is but one opportunity of a kind.”

— Henry David Thoreau

484. “No man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. No man has the desire and the ability to work onhigh things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging.”

— Henry David Thoreau

485. “While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.”

— Henry David Thoreau

486. “Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys.”

— Henry David Thoreau

487. “Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds?”

— Henry David Thoreau

488. “We must have infinite faith in each other.”

— Henry David Thoreau

489. “Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.”

— Henry David Thoreau

490. “Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up.”

— Henry David Thoreau

491. “Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.”

— Henry David Thoreau

492. “Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?”

— Henry David Thoreau

493. “It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience, but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.”

— Henry David Thoreau

494. “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”

— Henry David Thoreau

495. “Who hears the fishes when they cry?”

— Henry David Thoreau

496. “The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.”

— Henry David Thoreau

497. “We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.”

— Henry David Thoreau

498. “Fire is the most tolerable third party.”

— Henry David Thoreau

499. “I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.”

— Henry David Thoreau

500. “The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow,-one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness.”

— Henry David Thoreau