"Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand."
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 119 of 139)
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"The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?"
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"Sometimes you have to leave the world in order to learn how to live in it. Thoreau shunned society, went to the woods, and came back with a new understanding of life."
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"Oh to reach the point of death and realize one has not lived at all."
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"My themes will not be far-fetched. I will tell of homely every-day phenomena and adventures."
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"The rule is to carry as little as possible."
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"To what end do I lead a simple life at all, pray? That I may teach others to simplify their lives? - and so all our lives be simplified merely, like an algebraic formula? Or not, rather, that I may make use of the ground I have cleared to live more worthily and profitably?"
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"The savage lives simply through ignorance and idleness or laziness, but the philosopher lives simply through wisdom."
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"As for the complex ways of living, I love them not, however much I practice them. In as many places as possible, I will get my feet down to the earth."
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"Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice."
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"The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us."
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"My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought - with these I deal."
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"There are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or inlet, yet unexplored by him."
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"Our science, so called, is always more barren and mixed with error than our sympathies."
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"There is not so good an understanding between any two, but the exposure by the one of a serious fault in the other will produce a misunderstanding in proportion to its heinousness."
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"If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me."
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"Some would find fault with the morning, if they ever got up early enough.. The fault find faults even in Paradise."
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"Many college text-books, which were a weariness and stumbling-block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit."
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"There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers"
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"Bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy."
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