"We are all of us more or less active physiognomists."
Read quote
56 likes
Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 6 of 139)
2.8K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them."
Read quote
56 likes
"Let nothing come between you and the light."
Read quote
55 likes
"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting."
Read quote
55 likes
"Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?"
Read quote
55 likes
"The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace."
Read quote
55 likes
"The true harvest of my life is intangible - a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched."
Read quote
55 likes
"Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake."
Read quote
55 likes
"Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit."
Read quote
55 likes
"That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the country's champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?"
Read quote
55 likes
"This world is but a canvas to our imagination."
Read quote
54 likes
"Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature -if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you -know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse."
Read quote
54 likes
"A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature."
Read quote
54 likes
"The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but last fruits also."
Read quote
54 likes
"For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old."
Read quote
53 likes
"In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial."
Read quote
52 likes
"All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable."
Read quote
51 likes
"Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?"
Read quote
51 likes
"One must maintain a little bittle of summer, even in the middle of winter."
Read quote
51 likes
"In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line."
Read quote
51 likes