Top 2798 Quotes & Sayings by Henry David Thoreau - Page 47

I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with thosewhich are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation.

Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? Learn to split wood, at least.

I do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not; but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them.

Perhaps anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men and five negroes were concerned in the late enterprise; but their very anxiety to prove this might suggest to themselves that all is not told. Why do they still dodge the truth? They are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. They at most only criticise the tactics.

I had a classmate who fitted for college by the lamps of a lighthouse, which was more light, we think, than the University afforded.

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice. Where is the skillful swordsman who can give clean wounds, and not rip up his work with the other edge?

I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath.

Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th,1847.

I have much to learn of the Indian, nothing of the missionary.

We say justly that the weak person is flat, for, like all flat substances, he does not stand in the direction of his strength, that is, on his edge, but affords a convenient surface to put upon. He slides all the way through life.... But the brave man is a perfect sphere, which cannot fall on its flat side and is equally strong every way.

Do not suffer your life to be taken by newspapers.

How many a poor immortal soul I have met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it [an oversized home].

Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic.

There is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but the farthest east.

When the State wishes to endow an academy or university, it grants it a tract of forest land: one saw represents an academy, a gang, a university.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting a compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them.

Consider the islands bearing the names of all the saints, bristling with forts like chestnut-burs, or Echinidæ, yet the police will not let a couple of Irishmen have a private sparring- match on one of them, as it is a government monopoly; all the great seaports are in a boxing attitude, and you must sail prudently between two tiers of stony knuckles before you come to feel the warmth of their breasts.

No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher.

As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day.

What an admirable training is science for the more active warfare of life! Indeed, the unchallenged bravery which these studies imply, is far more impressive than the trumpeted valor of the warrior.

If a man were to place himself in an attitude to bear manfully the greatest evil that can be inflicted on him, he would find suddenly that there was no such evil to bear; his brave back would go a-begging.

I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.

The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned at the stake, suggested new modes of tortures to their tormentors. Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer; and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did.

What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see whata work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. Where is our professor of belles-lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well?

The schools begin with what they call the elements, and where do they end?

Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.

I learned to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of nature, rather than a member of society.

I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

Many expressions in the New Testament come naturally to the lips of all Protestants, and it furnishes the most pregnant and practical texts. There is no harmless dreaming, no wise speculation in it, but everywhere a substratum of good sense. It never reflects, but it repents. There is no poetry in it, we may say, nothing regarded in the light of beauty merely, but moral truth is its object. All mortals are convicted by its conscience.

To the virtuous man, the universe is the only sanctum sanctorum, and the penetralia of the temple are the broad noon of his existence.

Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.

The life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in theinfringement as in the observance, and our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense of virtue of some kind. The decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands sun, wind, and rain no less than the green one. It secretes sap and performs the functions of health. If we choose, we may study the alburnum only. The gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling.

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them - as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon.

Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end.

What have I to do with plows? I cut another furrow than you see.

This generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us.... But the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range, are still as shallow as ever.

Why will we be imposed on by antiquity?

All health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure helps to make me sad anddoes me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it.