"To live a better life,--this surely can be done."
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 137 of 139)
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"What have I to do with plows? I cut another furrow than you see."
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"As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day."
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"For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it (life), whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to 'glorify God and enjoy him forever.'"
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"A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil."
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"To forget all about your mistakes adds to them perhaps."
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"To see wild life you must go forth at wild season."
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"Here I am thirty-four years old, and yet my life is almost wholly unexpanded. How much time is in the germ! There is such an interval between my ideal and the actual in many circumstances that I may say I am unborn."
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"I make it my business to extract from Nature what ever nutriment she can furnish me.... I milk the sky and the earth."
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"How many fine thoughts has every man had! How few fine thoughts are expressed!"
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"Work your vein till it is exhausted, or conducts you to a broader one."
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"When the State wishes to endow an academy or university, it grants it a tract of forest land: one saw represents an academy, a gang, a university."
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"The schools begin with what they call the elements, and where do they end?"
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"Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? Learn to split wood, at least."
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"Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses; but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes."
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"Unless the human race perspire more than I do, there is no occasion to live by the sweat of their brow. If men cannot get on without money (the smallest amount will suffice), the truest method of earning it is by working as a laborer at one dollar per day. You are least dependent so; I speak as an expert, having used several kinds of labor."
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"Long enough I had heard of irrelevant things; now at length I was glad to make acquaintance with the light that dwells in rotten wood. Where is all your knowledge gone to? It evaporates completely, for it has no depth."
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"I keep a mountain anchored off eastward a little way, which I ascend in my dreams both awake and asleep. Its broad base spreads over a village or two, which does not know it; neither does it know them, nor do I when I ascend it. I can see its general outline as plainly now in my mind as that of Wachusett. I do not invent in the least, but state exactly what I see. I find that I go up it when I am light-footed and earnest. It ever smokes like an altar with its sacrifice. I am not aware that a single villager frequents it or knows of it. I keep this mountain to ride instead of a horse."
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"No domain of nature is quite closed to man at all times."
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"That is a pathetic inquiry among travelers and geographers after the site of ancient Troy. It is not near where they think it is.When a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be the place it occupied!"
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