"Instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them."
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 48 of 139)
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"We discover a new world every time we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow."
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"It is strange to talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains."
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"What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm."
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"The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!"
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"Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet."
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"Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it."
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"When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?"
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"Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. A perfect work of man's art would also be wild or natural in a good sense."
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"My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks."
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"Read not the Times, read the Eternities."
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"Don't be afraid that your life will end, be afraid that it will never begin!"
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"First, there is the power of the Wind, constantly exerted over the globe... Here is an almost incalculable power at our disposal, yet how trifling the use we make of it."
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"To inherit property is not to be born - it is to be still-born, rather."
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"Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit."
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"My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it."
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"To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written."
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"A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself."
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"Duty is one and invariable; it requires no impossibilities, nor can it ever be disregarded with impunity."
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"The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance."
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