Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

At length the sun's rays have attained the right angle, and warm winds blow up mist and rain and melt the snow-banks, and the sun dispersing the mist smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and white smoking with incense, through which the traveller picks his way from islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter which they are bearing off.

The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever!... The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring... The grass flames up on the hill sides like a spring fire... as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame...

The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim.

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, — that is your success.

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.

Good for the body is the work of the body, and good for the soul, the work of the soul, and good for either, the work of the other.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them and see his fellows with impartial eye afar, for half his days, he is esteemed a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods, he is esteemed industrious and enterprising — making earth bald before its time.

One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones, walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice.

The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, — so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

The devil finds work for idle hands.

It is not worth while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

If the work is high and far, You must not only aim aright, But draw the bow with all your might.

Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other.

He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

Poetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when he has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes.

Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.

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.

The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.