Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

Oh, one world at a 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 fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter, and is about as ample at one season as at another. It is as well for cheerfulness as for warmth and dryness.

But the place which you have selected for your camp, though never so rough and grim, begins at once to have its attractions, and becomes a very centre of civilization to you: "Home is home, be it never so homely."

I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?

Fire is the most tolerable third party.

The swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.

If the day and night be such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more immortal — that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself.

He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.

A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be in Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.

The same law that shapes the earth-star shapes the snow-star. As surely as the petals of a flower are fixed, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth.

I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.

A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

So we defend ourselves and our henroosts, and maintain slavery.

A gun gives you the body, not the bird.

"Hear! hear!" screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, "winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it."

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

Every man is the builder of a Temple called his body, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead.

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.