Henry David Thoreau

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an …

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.

I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism. Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer. I am surprised, as well as delighted, when this happens, it is such a rare use he would make of me, as if he were acquainted …

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented.

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

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

In wildness is the preservation of the world. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The city imports it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.

I am here to plead his cause with you. I plead not for his life, but for his character — his immortal life; and so it becomes your cause wholly, and is not his in the least. Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this …

I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable.

I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.

It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the …

I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?

The only government that I recognize—and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army — is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice.

He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however …

A living dog is better than a dead lion.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours ... In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe …

Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in …

I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear

and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.