Henry David Thoreau Might Quotations

I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.

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

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?... We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

Listen to music religiously, as if it were the last strain you might hear.

I have climbed several higher mountains without guide or path, and have found, as might be expected, that it takes only more time and patience commonly than to travel the smoothest highway.

The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not.

Some are "industrious," and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to suchI have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do,--work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers.

A man might well pray that he may not taboo or curse any portion of nature by being buried in it.

A journal is a repository for all those fragmentary ideas and odd scraps of information that might otherwise be lost and which some day might lead to more "harmonious compositions."

I wished only to be set down in Canada, and take one honest walk there as I might in Concord woods of an afternoon.

No people ever lived by cursing their fathers, however great a curse their fathers might have been to them.

Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid.

How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.

I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays.

History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning ofthings, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,--when did burdock and plantain sprout first?