"Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life."
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 29 of 139)
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"All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy."
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"A Friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us."
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"How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding ; How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile."
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"The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, - you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, - I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that."
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"The eye is the jewel of the body."
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"It's not enough to be busy."
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"The era of wild apples will soon be over. I wander through old orchards of great extent, now all gone to decay, all of native fruit which for the most part went to the cider mill. But since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no wild apples, such as I see everywhere in deserted pastures, and where the woods have grown up among them, are set out. I fear that he who walks over these hills a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples."
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"As to conforming outwardly and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that."
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"By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber."
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"We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue."
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"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea."
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"I love you not as something private and personal, which is my own, but as something universal and worthy of love which I have found."
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"The flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree's, so copious and so delicious to both sight and scent."
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"When I consider that the noble animals have been exterminated here - the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc, etc - I cannot but feel as I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country."
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"In all perception of the truth there is a divine ecstasy, an inexpressible delirium of joy, as when a youth embraces his betrothed virgin."
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"A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars."
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"The true finish is the work of time, and the use to which a thing is put. The elements are still polishing the pyramids."
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"When a noble deed is done, who is likely to appreciate it? They who are noble themselves."
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"When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today."
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