"Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him."
Read quote
10 likes
Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 26 of 139)
2.8K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!"
Read quote
10 likes
"Impulse is, after all, the best linguist; its logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, cannot fail to be most convincing."
Read quote
10 likes
"As I love nature, as I love singing birds...I love thee, my friend."
Read quote
10 likes
"This whole earth in which we inhabit is but a point is space."
Read quote
10 likes
"You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society."
Read quote
10 likes
"Music never stops; it is only the listening that is intermittent."
Read quote
10 likes
"Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled."
Read quote
10 likes
"New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion."
Read quote
10 likes
"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."
Read quote
10 likes
"The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."
Read quote
10 likes
"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
Read quote
10 likes
"I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected. Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to extreme old age."
Read quote
10 likes
"I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes."
Read quote
10 likes
"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail."
Read quote
10 likes
"The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile,... the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world."
Read quote
10 likes
"I thrive best on solitude. If I have had a companion only one day in a week, unless it were one or two I could name, I find that the value of the week to me has been seriously affected. It dissipates my days, and often it takes me another week to get over it."
Read quote
10 likes
"A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight."
Read quote
10 likes
"I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage."
Read quote
10 likes
"In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment and will never be more divine in the lapse of the ages. Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but when I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains."
Read quote
10 likes