Henry David Thoreau Experience Quotations

One must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.

We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads,--and then we can hardly see anything else.

The stars are distant and unobtrusive, but bright and enduring as our fairest and most memorable experiences.

The scholar is not apt to make his most familiar experience come gracefully to the aid of his expression.

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

The intercourse of the sexes, I have dreamed, is incredibly beautiful, too fair to be remembered. I have had thoughts about it, but they are among the most fleeting and irrecoverable in my experience.

We are superior to the joy we experience.

The experience of every past moment but belies the faith of each present.

It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever.

It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.

If within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil's angels.

In the unbending of the arm to do the deed there is experience worth all the maxims in the world.

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced.

Who is old enough to have learned from experience?

The value of any experience is measured, of course, not by the amount of money, but the amount of development we get out of it.

Surely one may as profitably be soaked in the juices of a swamp for one day as pick his way dry-shod over sand. Cold and damp ? are they not as rich experience as warmth and dryness?

I think that no experience which I have today comes up to, or is comparable with, the experiences of my boyhood.

We are older by faith than by experience.

We can conceive of nothing more fair than something which we have experienced.