"Love your life, poor as it is."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 96 of 139)
2.8K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents."
Read quote
3 likes
"The intercourse of the sexes, I have dreamed, is incredibly beautiful, too fair to be remembered. I have had thoughts about it, but they are among the most fleeting and irrecoverable in my experience."
Read quote
3 likes
"This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle!"
Read quote
3 likes
"I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account."
Read quote
3 likes
"The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindu, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich inward."
Read quote
3 likes
"If you are describing any occurrence... make two or more distinct reports at different times... We discriminate at first only a few features, and we need to reconsider our experience from many points of view and in various moods in order to perceive the whole."
Read quote
3 likes
"If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire,--thinnerthan the paper on which it is printed,--then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them."
Read quote
3 likes
"It is not in vain that man speaks to man. This is the value of literature."
Read quote
3 likes
"In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident."
Read quote
3 likes
"If rightly made, a boat would be a sort of amphibious animal, a creature of two elements, related by one half its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to some strong-winged and graceful bird."
Read quote
3 likes
"How imperceptibly the first springing takes place!"
Read quote
3 likes
"This life we live is a strange dream, and I don't believe at all any account men give of it."
Read quote
3 likes
"I noticed, as I had done before, that there was a lull among the mosquitoes about midnight, and that they began again in the morning. Nature is thus merciful. But apparently they need rest as well as we."
Read quote
3 likes
"I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural."
Read quote
3 likes
"While my friend was my friend, he flattered me, and I never heard the truth from him. When he became my enemy, he shot it to me on a poisoned arrow."
Read quote
3 likes
"My friend is one who takes me for what I am. A stranger takes me for something else than what I am. . . . 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. It brings men together in crowds and mobs in bar-rooms and elsewhere, but it does not deserve the name of virtue."
Read quote
3 likes
"Summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf."
Read quote
3 likes
"To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense,it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it."
Read quote
3 likes
"The order of things should be reversed; the seventh day should be the day of toil...and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this widerspread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature."
Read quote
3 likes