"Say, Not so, and you will out circle the philosophers."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 83 of 139)
2.8K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our friends' thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed; when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be."
Read quote
3 likes
"There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold."
Read quote
3 likes
"God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us."
Read quote
3 likes
"What shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses? A government that pretends to be Christian and crucifies a million Christs every day!"
Read quote
3 likes
"Be as the sailor who keeps the polestar in his eye. By so doing we may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we will maintain a true course."
Read quote
3 likes
"Nothing is so much to be feared as fear."
Read quote
3 likes
"I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere."
Read quote
3 likes
"Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage."
Read quote
3 likes
"The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it."
Read quote
3 likes
"I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself."
Read quote
3 likes
"Everything counts for gain when we are cosmically awake. Nothing counts, unless we are awake. No enjoyments last, no successes satisfy, no gains have meaning unless accomplished in a state of wakefulness."
Read quote
3 likes
"The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize or are fertilized. It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination...without nature-awakened imagination most persons do not really live in the world, they merely pass through it as they live dull lives of quiet desperation."
Read quote
3 likes
"Cast your whole vote, not a piece of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless when it conforms to a majority; but is irresistable when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose."
Read quote
3 likes
"Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her."
Read quote
3 likes
"What are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?"
Read quote
3 likes
"The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee."
Read quote
3 likes
"Fishing has been styled 'a contemplative man's recreation,' ... and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation."
Read quote
3 likes
"Life is grand, and so are its environments of Past and Future. Would the face of nature be so serene and beautiful if man's destiny were not equally so?"
Read quote
3 likes
"However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the lay, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned."
Read quote
3 likes