"Most, it would seem to me, do not care for nature and would sell their share."
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 81 of 139)
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"A fact may blossom into a truth."
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"We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge."
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"Why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse?"
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"Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, which in others are luxuries merely and in others still are entirely unknown."
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"Tough times don't last but tough people do. No matter how slow you go, you are still lapping everybody on the couch. Men are born to succeed, not fail."
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"Be wary of technology; it is often merely an improved means to an unimproved end."
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"I think it will be found that he who speaks with most authority on a given subject is not ignorant of what has been said by his predecessors. He will take his place in a regular order, and substantially add his own knowledge to the knowledge of previous generations."
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"There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of "expediency." There is no such thing as sliding up- hill.In morals the only sliders are backsliders."
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"On the whole, my respect for my fellow-men, except as one may outweigh a million, is not being increased these days.... Such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that, in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable, and does not depend on our watering and cultivating; that when you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such force and vitality, that it does not ask our leave to germinate."
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"Nothing can shock a brave man but dullness."
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"They who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts. Their measures are half measures and makeshifts merely. They put off the day of settlement, and meanwhile the debt accumulates."
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"Where is the "unexplored land" but in our own untried enterprises? To an adventurous spirit any place--London, New York, Worcester, or his own yard--is "unexplored land," to seek which Frémont and Kane travel so far. To a sluggish and defeated spirit even the Great Basin and the Polaris are trivial places."
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"The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks."
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"There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,--all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!"
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"A man must generally get away some hundreds or thousands of miles from home before he can be said to begin his travels. Why not begin his travels at home? Would he have to go far or look very closely to discover novelties? The traveler who, in this sense, pursues his travels at home, has the advantage at any rate of a long residence in the country to make his observations correct and profitable. Now the American goes to England, while the Englishman comes to America, in order to describe the country."
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"So is the English Parliament provincial. Mere country bumpkins, they betray themselves, when any more important question arises for them to settle, the Irish question, for instance,--the English question why did I not say? Their natures are subdued to what they work in. Their "good breeding" respects only secondary objects."
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"There is reason in the distinction of civil and uncivil. The manners are sometimes so rough a rind that we doubt whether they cover any core or sap-wood at all."
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"It is a great pleasure to escape sometimes from the restless class of Reformers. What if these grievances exist? So do you and I."
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"It is not worth the while to live by rich cookery."
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