"If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible."
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 43 of 139)
2.8K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Events, circumstances, etc., have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown."
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"If within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil's angels."
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"The only wealth is life."
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"We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice."
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"It is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning."
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"It is tranquil people who accomplish much."
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"Whether he sleeps or wakes,--whether he runs or walks,--whether he uses a microscope or a telescope, or his naked eye,--a man never discovers anything, never overtakes anything, or leaves anything behind, but himself. Whatever he says or does, he merely reports himself. If he is in love, he loves; if he is in heaven, he enjoys; if he is in hell, he suffers. It is his condition that determines his locality."
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"People die of fright and live of confidence."
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"A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land."
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"If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it."
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"With wisdom we shall learn liberality."
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"Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men."
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"Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but findher our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds."
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"I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it."
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"We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not."
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"Where there is a brave man, in the thickest of the fight, there is the post of honor."
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"I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit."
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"I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention. Man is but the place where I stand, and the prospect hence is infinite."
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"A worm is as good a traveler as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper."
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