Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself.

Most men cry better than they speak. You get more nurture out of them by pinching than addressing them.

To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.

When a man truly commits, the universe will conspire to assure his success.

It is said that a rogue does not look you in the face, neither does an honest man look at you as if he had his reputation to establish.

What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.

Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

If within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil's angels.

It is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning.

A man receives only what he is ready to receive... The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest of what he has observed, he does not observe.

Men are probably nearer the essential truth in their superstitions than in their science.

Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.

Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

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.

Wherever men have lived, there is a story to be told

When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?

I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung.

We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches.