Top 500 Henry David Thoreau Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “One is wise to cultivate the tree that bears fruit in our soul.”

— Henry David Thoreau

352. “Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.”

— Henry David Thoreau

353. “It is as hard to see one’s self as to look backwards without turning around.”

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

355. “Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other.”

— Henry David Thoreau

356. “Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.”

— Henry David Thoreau

357. “Dissent without action is consent.”

— Henry David Thoreau

358. “What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation!”

— Henry David Thoreau

359. “The only wealth is life.”

— Henry David Thoreau

360. “It is a great art to saunter !”

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

362. “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

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

366. “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

367. “We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bone.”

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

369. “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

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

— Henry David Thoreau

371. “Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.”

— Henry David Thoreau

372. “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

373. “Knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another’s experience only by his own.”

— Henry David Thoreau

374. “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

375. “I was not born to be forced.”

— Henry David Thoreau

376. “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

377. “Talk of mysteries! – Think of our life in nature, – daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, – rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?”

— Henry David Thoreau

378. “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

— Henry David Thoreau

379. “It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.”

— Henry David Thoreau

380. “The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.”

— Henry David Thoreau

381. “Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar’s atmosphere.”

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

383. “It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.”

— Henry David Thoreau

384. “We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.”

— Henry David Thoreau

385. “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

386. “Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open.”

— Henry David Thoreau

387. “Let your walks now be a little more adventurous.”

— Henry David Thoreau

388. “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.”

— Henry David Thoreau

389. “The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secrets of things.”

— Henry David Thoreau

390. “The three-o’-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest.”

— Henry David Thoreau

391. “Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.”

— Henry David Thoreau

392. “The silence sings. It is musical. I remember a night when it was audible. I heard the unspeakable.”

— Henry David Thoreau

393. “Life in us is like the water in a river.”

— Henry David Thoreau

394. “You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.”

— Henry David Thoreau

395. “Summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf.”

— Henry David Thoreau

396. “Love is no individual’s experience; and though we are imperfect mediums, it does not partake of our imperfection; though we are finite, it is infinite and eternal...”

— Henry David Thoreau

397. “Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident. It is as common as life.”

— Henry David Thoreau

398. “We loiter in winter while it is already spring.”

— Henry David Thoreau

399. “If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality.”

— Henry David Thoreau

400. “Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.”

— Henry David Thoreau