Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful-while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.

Wherever you may seek solitude, men will ferret you out and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows.

Men reverence one another, not yet God.

Men spend the best parts of their lives earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.

Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.

A man's whole life is taxed for the least thing well done. It is its net result.

When I would go a-visiting, I find that I go off the fashionable street,--not being inclined to change my dress,--to where man meets man, and not polished shoe meets shoe.

We inspire friendship in men when we have contracted friendship with the gods.

What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is.

A man cannot wheedle nor overawe his Genius. It requires to be conciliated by nobler conduct than the world demands or can appreciate.

Every man should stand for a force which is perfectly irresistible.

Some, it seems to me, elect their rulers for their crookedness. But I think that a straight stick makes the best cane, and an upright man the best ruler.

What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator.

We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, or greater snow would put a period to man's existence on the globe.

One who knew how to appropriate the true value of this world would be the poorest man in it. The poor rich man! all he has is whathe has bought.

It would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run.

Men cannot conceive of a state of things so fair that it cannot be realized.

We could not help contrasting the equanimity of Nature with the bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume alwaysa crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending.

To say that God has given a man many and great talents frequently means that he has brought his heavens down within reach of his hands.

Show me a man who feels bitterly toward John Brown, and let me hear what noble verse he can repeat. He'll be as dumb as if his lips were stone.

But, commonly, men are as much afraid of love as of hate.

If ever I did a man any goodof course it was something exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil which I am constantly doing by being what I am.

The greater number of men are merely corporals.

A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject of the Turkish government.