Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

I make it my business to extract from Nature what ever nutriment she can furnish me.... I milk the sky and the earth.

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

One can hardly imagine a more healthful employment, or one more favorable to contemplation and the observation of nature.

Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.

Most, it would seem to me, do not care for nature and would sell their share.

What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more.

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree or a yellow birch or an old acquaintance among the pines.

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully though I never received one cent for it.

The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful.

Let things alone; let them weigh what they will; let them soar or fall.

The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur.

You cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind.

In a world of peace and love, music would be the universal language.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.

I think that Nature meant kindly when she made our brothers few. However, my voice is still for peace.

It often happens that a man develops a deeper love and friendship with his pet cat or dog than he does with most of the other humans in his life.

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

To be a philosopher... is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

The highest condition of art is artlessness.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Especially the transcendental philosophy needs the leaven of humor to render it light and digestible.