Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Speech, Poets, Poetry
The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.
—Henry David Thoreau
We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Home, Adventure
The universe is wider than our views of it.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Universe, The Universe
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Voting
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: News
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing it is not fish they are after.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Self-Knowledge, Purpose, Awareness
Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let them be your only diet, drink, and botanical medicines.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Time, Living, Seasons
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Virtue, Advice, Cheating, Morals, Morality, Value
So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Attitude
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Friendship, Solitude
We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Intelligence
It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Imagination
Associate reverently, and as much as you can, with your loftiest thoughts.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Thoughts, Thinking, Thought
Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Common Sense
This world is but a canvas to our imagination.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: World, One liners, Imagination
A friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. The friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other’s hopes. They are kind to each other’s dreams.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Friends and Friendship
The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Animals
One man lies in his work, and gets a bad reputation; another in his manners, and enjoys a good one.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Lies
Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Fear
It is strange that men will talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Love
I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Advice
Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Inspiration, Memory
For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Books
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Society
Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Faith
Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Virtues, Honesty, Truth
Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Disappointment, Regret, Remorse
The eye is the jewel of the body.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Miscellaneous, The Body, Eyes
Nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow. She seems not to have provided for, but by a thousand contrivances against it. She has bevelled the margins of the eyelids that the tears may not overflow on the cheek.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Sorrow
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Ralph Waldo Emerson American Philosopher
- Amos Bronson Alcott American Teacher
- Mortimer J. Adler American Philosopher, Educator
- John Cage American Composer
- Charles Sanders Peirce American Philosopher
- Walt Whitman American Poet
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Kahlil Gibran Lebanese-born American Philosopher
- Will Durant American Historian, Philosopher
- George Santayana Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher
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