Quill / Authors / Henry David Thoreau quotes
Henry David Thoreau quotes
Henry David Thoreau (1817 to 1862) lived in a cabin he built by Walden Pond from 1845 to 1847, about two miles from his home town of Concord. Walden came out in 1854. Quill also quotes A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, along with Excursions and Cape Cod, the last two published after his death.
He's funnier than his reputation. Walden's first chapter has an itemised bill for the cabin and a great many jokes at his neighbours' expense. Read him as a man doing sums on his own life, and the sermonising gets easier to take.
60 lines shown, from the 123 in Quill. Only lines checked against a public-domain text appear on this page.
Walden
Read Walden on Project Gutenberg
Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.
Read the passage around this line
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite …
All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere.
Read the passage around this line
… hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.” Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and …
Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.
Read the passage around this line
I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we …
Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.
Read the passage around this line
… significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.
Read the passage around this line
Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.
Say what you have to say, not what you ought.
Read the passage around this line
… we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. “Tell the tailors,” said he, “to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch.” His companion’s prayer is forgotten.
Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.
Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.
Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.
Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will never become English hay.
Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind.
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
Love your life, poor as it is.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?
Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
Why should we knock under and go with the stream?
We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.
Morning brings back the heroic ages.
A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.
Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.
In a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven.
The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling.
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
If the bell rings, why should we run?
We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.
Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow.
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Enjoy the land, but own it not.
Our life is frittered away by detail.
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Read A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers on Project Gutenberg
Men do not fail commonly for want of knowledge, but for want of prudence to give wisdom the preference.
Friendship is evanescent in every man’s experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers.
A man’s life should be constantly as fresh as this river.
The true finish is the work of time, and the use to which a thing is put.
The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings.
What avails it that another loves you, if he does not understand you?
You must be calm before you can utter oracles.
Waves of serener life pass over us from time to time, like flakes of sunlight over the fields in cloudy weather.
A man’s whole life is taxed for the least thing well done.
A man is not his hope, nor his despair, nor yet his past deed.
Our life without love is like coke and ashes.
The hero then will know how to wait, as well as to make haste.
Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.
We are continually acting a part in a more interesting drama than any written.
The reform which you talk about can be undertaken any morning before unbarring our doors.
Excursions
Read Excursions on Project Gutenberg
We must look a long time before we can see.
An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon.
What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet.
All this you surely will see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it,—if you look for it.
Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present.
Cape Cod
Read Cape Cod on Project Gutenberg
Nothing remarkable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood.
In Quill, a line opens into the passage around it. Free forever for basic widgets and 3 of your own lines. Pro from $2.99 a month, with unlimited lines.
Coming soon to the App Store