"We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, or greater snow would put a period to man's existence on the globe."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 128 of 139)
2.8K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You may tell by looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile, whether its winter is past or not."
Read quote
3 likes
"The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at last."
Read quote
3 likes
"Winter is the time for study, you know, and the colder it is the more studious we are."
Read quote
3 likes
"How wholesome winter is, seen far or near; how good, above all mere sentimental, warm-blooded, short-lived, soft-hearted, moral goodness, commonly so called. Give me the goodness which has forgotten its own deeds,--which God has seen to be good, and let be."
Read quote
3 likes
"The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast- off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion."
Read quote
3 likes
"Good deeds are no less good because their object is unworthy."
Read quote
3 likes
"All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent enjoy the story."
Read quote
3 likes
"If ever I did a man any goodof course it was something exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil which I am constantly doing by being what I am."
Read quote
3 likes
"In a thousand apparently humble ways men busy themselves to make some right take the place of some wrong,--if it is only to make abetter paste blacking,--and they are themselves so much the better morally for it."
Read quote
3 likes
"Where there is not discernment, the behavior even of the purest soul may in effect amount to coarseness."
Read quote
3 likes
"It is not so important that many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump."
Read quote
3 likes
"Friends will be much apart. They will respect more each other's privacy than their communion."
Read quote
3 likes
"I suppose that the great questions of "Fate, Freewill, Foreknowledge Absolute," which used to be discussed at Concord, are still unsettled."
Read quote
3 likes
"It seems as if the more youthful and impressible streams can hardly resist the numerous invitations and temptations to leave theirnative beds and run down their neighbors' channels."
Read quote
3 likes
"But, commonly, men are as much afraid of love as of hate."
Read quote
3 likes
"Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive."
Read quote
3 likes
"If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man,--and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages,--it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."
Read quote
3 likes
"Every wild apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every wild child. It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a lesson to man! So are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the celestial fruit which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by fate; and only the most persistent and strongest genius defends itself and prevails, sends a tender scion upward at last, and drops its perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth. Poets and philosophers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men."
Read quote
3 likes
"It gets laughed at because it is a small town, I know, but nevertheless it is a place where great men may be born any day, for fair winds and foul blow right on over it without distinction."
Read quote
3 likes