Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, andflatter and study effect only more finely than the rest.

The man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.

Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a different season.

I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse.

What is man but a mass of thawing clay?

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them.

In civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes.

The man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when I wished to see himself.

Every man is entitled to come to Cattle-Show, even a transcendentalist; and for my part I am more interested in the men than in the cattle.

A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it.

Still we live meanly like ants, though the fable tells us we were long ago changed into men.

He is the rich man, and enjoys the fruit of his riches, who summer and winter forever can find delight in his own thoughts.

The mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible.

If you are a seer, whenever you meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and much that he pretends to disown, behind him.

It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow so.

When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.

So soon did we, wayfarers, begin to learn that man's life is rounded with the same few facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel to find it new.

The necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things to the scholar is rarely well remembered.

A man may travel fast enough and earn his living on the road.

I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society.

A man's wealth is measured by what he doesn't need.

When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow.

Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmie that he can? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made

We saw men haying far off in the meadow, their heads waving like the grass which they cut. In the distance the wind seemed to bend all alike.