Henry David Thoreau Should Quotations

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.

I think that every town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, either in one body or several, where a stick would never be cut for fuel, not for the navy, not to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses - a common possession for instruction and recreation.

Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?

It is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning.

A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in.

Though the hen should sit all day, she could lay only one egg, and, besides, would not have picked up materials for another.

If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui.

I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps I have owed to this employment and tohunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance.

I could lecture on dry oak leaves; I could, but who would hear me? If I were to try it on any large audience, I fear it would be no gain to them, and a positive loss to me. I should have behaved rudely toward my rustling friends.

I should have liked to come across a large community of pines, which had never been invaded by the lumbering army.

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

We should impart our courage and not our despair.

Spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

The botanist should make interest with the bees if he would know when the flowers open and when they close.

Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East -- to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them -- who were above such trifling.