Famous Quotes by Henry David Thoreau (298 Quotations)

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.

Henry David Thoreau – [Socializing and Socialism]

What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?

Henry David Thoreau – [Grief]

What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?

Henry David Thoreau – [Philosophers and Philosophy]

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

Henry David Thoreau – [Law and Lawyers]

When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

Henry David Thoreau – [Progress]

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat.

Henry David Thoreau – [Grammar]

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

Henry David Thoreau – [Institutions]

Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?

Henry David Thoreau – [Editing and Editors]

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Henry David Thoreau – [Common Sense]

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured and far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak.

Henry David Thoreau – [Purpose]

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Henry David Thoreau – [Inspiration]

Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.

Henry David Thoreau – [Patriotism]

You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.

Henry David Thoreau – [Time and Time Management]

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.

Henry David Thoreau – [People, Other]

You must get your living by loving, or at least half your life is a failure.

Henry David Thoreau – [Success]

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

Henry David Thoreau – [Present]

You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds.

Henry David Thoreau – [Eccentricity]

Youth gets together with their materials to build a bridge to the moon or maybe a palace on earth; then in middle age they decide to build a woodshed with them instead.

Henry David Thoreau – [Youth]