| A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Writing] |
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| How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Writing] |
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| What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Education] |
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| A person who chooses to die or to risk death demonstrates that there are values, principles, maxims, that are more valuable to him than is life itself. In short, he places his immortal self above his mortal self. Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Luck] |
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| Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Music] |
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| The bluebird carries the sky on his back. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Perspective] |
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| When a dog runs at you, whistle for him. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Perspective] |
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| Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Nature] |
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| 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. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Nature] |
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| Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Nature] |
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| Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Gardens] |
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| Law never made men a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.... In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [War] [Justice] |
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| Men are probably nearer the central truth in their superstitions than in their science. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Science] |
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| Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Conformity] |
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| We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Civilization] |
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| Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Success] |
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| Only that day dawns to which we are awake. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Opportunity] |
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| A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint.... What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Books] |
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| Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Books] |
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| How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. |
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- Henry David Thoreau |
more quotations on [Books] |
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