Henry David Thoreau Reform Quotations

Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man.

We should endeavor practically in our lives to correct all the defects which our imagination detects.

It is not so important that many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.

There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of "expediency." There is no such thing as sliding up- hill.In morals the only sliders are backsliders.

Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.

To speak or do anything that shall concern mankind, one must speak and act as if well, or from that grain of health which he has left.

We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many.

There are theoretical reformers at all times, and all the world over, living on anticipation.

I love reform better than its modes.

Why do you ever mend your clothes, unless that, wearing them, you may mend your ways. Let us sing.

The era of wild apples will soon be over. I wander through old orchards of great extent, now all gone to decay, all of native fruit which for the most part went to the cider mill. But since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no wild apples, such as I see everywhere in deserted pastures, and where the woods have grown up among them, are set out. I fear that he who walks over these hills a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples.

Faith, indeed, is all the reform that is needed; it is itself a reform.

There is no history of how bad became better.

To live a better life,--this surely can be done.