"We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect. [So why not suspect good rather than bad in events, people and life and thereby find it more?]"
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Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 40 of 139)
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"It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God."
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"What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life."
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"It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have...but shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?"
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"It is said that a rogue does not look you in the face, neither does an honest man look at you as if he had his reputation to establish."
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"In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,--not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!"
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"Far travel, very far travel, or travail, comes near to the worth of staying at home."
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"It [is of] some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessities of life."
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"Perfect alchemists I keep who can transmute substances without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold merely represents; and there is no Signor Blitz about it."
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"To one who habitually endeavors to contemplate the true state of things, the political state can hardly be said to have any existence whatever. It is unreal, incredible, and insignificant to him, and for him to endeavor to extract the truth from such lean material is like making sugar from linen rags, when sugar-cane may be had."
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"Those who work much do not work hard."
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"As far back as I can remember I have unconsciously referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence."
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"I have learned that even the smallest house can be a home."
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"From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality."
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"Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor."
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"We begin to praise when we begin to see a thing needs our assistance."
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"But what is quackery? It is commonly an attempt to cure the diseases of a man by addressing his body alone. There is need of a physician who shall minister to both soul and body at once, that is, to man. Now he falls between two stools."
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"The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever!"
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"I make my own time. I make my own terms. I cannot see how God or Nature can ever get the start of me."
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"See yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible farmhouse, the standard raised over some rural homestead.... It is a hieroglyphic of man's life, and suggests more intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. Where its fine column rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human life has planted itself,--and such is the beginning of Rome, the establishment of the arts, and the foundation of empires, whether on the prairies of America or the steppes of Asia."
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