Henry David Thoreau Literature Quotations

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.

May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!

It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.

They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.

There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.

It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

Every people have gods to suit their circumstances.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.

Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent.

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

There is no just and serene criticism as yet.

An unclean person is universally a slothful one.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks.

Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.

How can any man be weak who dares to be at all?

There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.

The heart is forever inexperienced.

All nations love the same jests and tales, Jews, Christians, and Mahometans, and the same translated suffice for all.

Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell and Wordsworth are but the rustling of leaves and crackling of twigs in the forest, and there is not yet the sound of any bird. The Muse has never lifted up her voice to sing.

Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at least of the best that is in literature.

We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between theilliterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were.

The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but as I love literature and to some extent the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much.

We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

Faith never makes a confession.

There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.

Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.

It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of today.

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell.

I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.

Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know.