"For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it."
Read quote
7 likes
Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 39 of 139)
2.8K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Being is the great explainer."
Read quote
7 likes
"I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad."
Read quote
7 likes
"When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality."
Read quote
7 likes
"When a man truly commits, the universe will conspire to assure his success."
Read quote
7 likes
"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry."
Read quote
7 likes
"What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new."
Read quote
7 likes
"There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted."
Read quote
7 likes
"Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe."
Read quote
7 likes
"There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone."
Read quote
7 likes
"It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all."
Read quote
7 likes
"The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river.... The word is from the Latin villa, which together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried.... Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without traveling themselves."
Read quote
7 likes
"It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders."
Read quote
7 likes
"In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy."
Read quote
7 likes
"This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used."
Read quote
7 likes
"Your religion is where your love is."
Read quote
7 likes
"I repeat that in this sense the most splendid court in Christendom is provincial, having authority to consult about Transalpine interests only, and not the affairs of Rome. A prætor or proconsul would suffice to settle the questions which absorb the attention of the English Parliament and the American Congress."
Read quote
7 likes
"I am engaged to Concord and my own private pursuits by 10,000 ties, and it would be suicide to rend them."
Read quote
7 likes
"Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?--to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring."
Read quote
7 likes
"Then at night the general stillness is more impressive than any sound, but occasionally you hear the note of an owl farther or nearer in the woods, and if near a lake, the semihuman cry of the loons at their unearthly revels."
Read quote
7 likes