Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

Truth, Goodness, Beauty - those celestial thrins,Continually are born; e'en now the Universe,With thousand throats, and eke with greener smiles,Its joy confesses at their recent birth.

Here or nowhere is our heaven.

It is not enough that we are truthful; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about.

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower into a truth.

If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

How sweet it would be to treat men and things, for an hour, for just what they are!

A fact may blossom into a truth.

As a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up.

There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.

Fame itself is but an epitaph; as late, as false, as true.

You speak of poverty and dependence. Who are poor and dependent? Who are rich and independent? When was it that men agreed to respect the appearance and not the reality?

He who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth.

A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard.

It is impossible to say all that we think, even to our truest Friend. We may bid him farewell forever sooner than complain, for our complaint is too well grounded to be uttered.

While my friend was my friend, he flattered me, and I never heard the truth from him. When he became my enemy, he shot it to me on a poisoned arrow.

If we dealt only with the false and dishonest, we should at last forget how to speak truth.

What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and sublimest truth?

All expression of truth does at length take this deep ethical form.

The poet will write for his peers alone. He will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely.

Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.

Where there is a lull in truth an institution springs up.

As the least drop of wine tinges the whole goblet, so the least particle of truth colors our whole life.

I am resolved that I will not through humility become the devil's attorney. I will endeavor to speak a good word for the truth.