Henry David Thoreau
All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.Collection: Truth
We love to hear some men speak, though we hear not what they say; the very air they breathe is rich and perfumed, and the sound of their voices falls on the ear like the rustling of leaves or the crackling of the fire. They stand many deep.Collection: Fall
The ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds.Collection: Loss
We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.Collection: Transcendentalism
On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning.Collection: Morning
As we lay huddled together under the tent, which leaked considerably about the sides, with our baggage at our feet, we listened to some of the grandest thunder which I ever heard, -rapid peals, round and plump, bang, bang, bang in succession, like artillery from some fortress in the sky; and the lightning was proportionally brilliant. The Indian said, 'It must be good powder.' All for the benefit of the moose and us, echoing far over the concealed lakes.Collection: Sky
The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.Collection: Attractive
Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs.Collection: Praise
He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the pastCollection: Life
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see - i.e. compare it to, something worse or better, that determines whether you are respectively grateful and happy or ungrateful and bitter.Collection: Gratitude
Probe the universe in a myriad of points. ... He is a wise man who has taken many views; to whom stones and plants and animals and a myriad of objects have each suggesting something, contributed something.Collection: Wise
I saw deep in the eyes of the animals the human soul look out upon me. I saw where it was born deep down under feathers and fur, or condemned for a while to roam four-footed among the brambles,I caught the clinging mute glance of the prisoner and swore that I would be faithful.Collection: Eye
The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.Collection: Men
When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in. I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here are no lying nor vain epitaphs.Collection: Death
The sacredness, if there is any, is all in yourself and not in the place.Collection: Sacredness
Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure.Collection: Civilization
One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.Collection: Memorable
The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal.Collection: Spring
The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, - you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, - I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that.Collection: Believe
There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.Collection: Nature
Only the defeated and deserters go to war.Collection: War
Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.Collection: Men
In some countries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight. Such a one might make a good shepherd's dog, but is far from being the Good Shepherd.Collection: Country
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.Collection: Garden
The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.Collection: Intellectual
To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.Collection: Good Morning
The biggest happiness is when at the end of the year you feel better than at the beginningCollection: Feel Better
Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man.Collection: Men
Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.Collection: Time
We communicate like the burrows of foxes, in silence and darkness, under ground. We are undermined by faith and love.Collection: Faith
The pleasures of the intellect are permanent, the pleasures of the heart are transitory.Collection: Heart
Undoubtedly, in the most brilliant successes, the first rank is always sacrificed.Collection: Success
Nature is slow, but sure; she works no faster than need be; she is the tortoise that wins the race by her perseverance.Collection: Perseverance
Whether he sleeps or wakes,--whether he runs or walks,--whether he uses a microscope or a telescope, or his naked eye,--a man never discovers anything, never overtakes anything, or leaves anything behind, but himself. Whatever he says or does, he merely reports himself. If he is in love, he loves; if he is in heaven, he enjoys; if he is in hell, he suffers. It is his condition that determines his locality.Collection: Running
A person who chooses to die or to risk death demonstrates that there are values, principles, maxims, that are more valuable to him than is life itself. In short, he places his immortal self above his mortal self. Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.Collection: Writing
When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip.Collection: Science
And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, - we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?Collection: Running
However mean your life is, meet it and live it.Collection: Life And Love
We do not live by justice, but by grace.Collection: Life
When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another.Collection: Reptiles
For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction.Collection: Change
Instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.Collection: Men
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?Collection: Eye
Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.Collection: Paper
Life is so short that it is not wise to take roundabout ways, nor can we spend much time in waiting.... We have not got half-way to dawn yet.Collection: Life
Steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one's style, both of speaking and writing.Collection: Writing
There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon.Collection: Horizon
Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. A perfect work of man's art would also be wild or natural in a good sense.Collection: Art