Henry David Thoreau Quotes
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301. “Men talk of freedom! How many are free to think? Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice? Nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand are perfect slaves.”

— Henry David Thoreau

302. “Writing your name can lead to writing sentences. And the next thing you’ll be doing is writing paragraphs, and then books. And then you’ll be in as much trouble as I am!”

— Henry David Thoreau

303. “Birds never sing in caves.”

— Henry David Thoreau

304. “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.”

— Henry David Thoreau

305. “I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don’t get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.”

— Henry David Thoreau

306. “The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful.”

— Henry David Thoreau

307. “Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.”

— Henry David Thoreau

308. “I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper.”

— Henry David Thoreau

309. “What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is.”

— Henry David Thoreau

310. “The gods cannot misunderstand, man cannot explain.”

— Henry David Thoreau

311. “I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future.”

— Henry David Thoreau

312. “Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.”

— Henry David Thoreau

313. “We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.”

— Henry David Thoreau

314. “Cowards suffer, heroes enjoy.”

— Henry David Thoreau

315. “I found that they knew but little of the history of their race, and could be entertained by stories about their ancestors as readily as any way .”

— Henry David Thoreau

316. “Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.”

— Henry David Thoreau

317. “The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at last.”

— Henry David Thoreau

318. “Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.”

— Henry David Thoreau

319. “When I think of the gold-diggers and the Mormons, the slaves and the slave-holders and the flibustiers, I naturally dream of a glorious private life. No, I am not patriotic.”

— Henry David Thoreau

320. “I stand in awe of my body.”

— Henry David Thoreau

321. “It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination.”

— Henry David Thoreau

322. “One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.”

— Henry David Thoreau

323. “I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.”

— Henry David Thoreau

324. “Be wary of technology; it is often merely an improved means to an unimproved end.”

— Henry David Thoreau

325. “Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.”

— Henry David Thoreau

326. “The voice of nature is always encouraging.”

— Henry David Thoreau

327. “Being a teacher is like being in jail; once it’s on your record, you can never get rid of it.”

— Henry David Thoreau

328. “The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!”

— Henry David Thoreau

329. “I was determined to know beans.”

— Henry David Thoreau

330. “Resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”

— Henry David Thoreau

331. “What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?”

— Henry David Thoreau

332. “A taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors.”

— Henry David Thoreau

333. “As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.”

— Henry David Thoreau

334. “Wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe.”

— Henry David Thoreau

335. “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

336. “All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.”

— Henry David Thoreau

337. “The nonchalance and dolce-far-niente air of nature and society hint at infinite periods in the progress of mankind.”

— Henry David Thoreau

338. “Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.”

— Henry David Thoreau

339. “As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.”

— Henry David Thoreau

340. “The tree of Knowledge is a Tree of Knowledge of good and evil.”

— Henry David Thoreau

341. “Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.”

— Henry David Thoreau

342. “It is a great art to saunter !”

— Henry David Thoreau

343. “Sweep away the clutter of things that complicate our lives.”

— Henry David Thoreau

344. “We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.”

— Henry David Thoreau

345. “Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and Spring.”

— Henry David Thoreau

346. “The only danger in Friendship is that it will end.”

— Henry David Thoreau

347. “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?”

— Henry David Thoreau

348. “I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.”

— Henry David Thoreau

349. “It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

— Henry David Thoreau

350. “Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn? – to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.”

— Henry David Thoreau