Henry David Thoreau World Quotations

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

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.

The sort of morality which the priests inculcate is a very subtle policy, far finer than the politicians', and the world is very successfully ruled by them as the policemen.

If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire,--thinnerthan the paper on which it is printed,--then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.

When we bring what is within out into the world, miracles happen.

Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.

Every child begins the world again.

Let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild, and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World

We discover a new world every time we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow.

I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.

We are ever dying to one world and being born into another.

One who knew how to appropriate the true value of this world would be the poorest man in it. The poor rich man! all he has is whathe has bought.

Pray, for what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuviæ; at last to go from this world to another newly furnished, and leave this to be burned?

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

It is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works is scrubbing in some part.

I suspect that, if you should go to the end of the world, you would find somebody there going farther, as if just starting for home at sundown, and having a last word before he drove off.

The world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand within it.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. [It allows you to] be the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark of your own streams and oceans; [to] explore your own higher latitudes; [to] be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle!

It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some "Symmes' Hole" by which to get at the inside at last.

Some have asked if the stock of men could not be improved,--if they could not be bred as cattle. Let Love be purified, and all therest will follow. A pure love is thus, indeed, the panacea for all the ills of the world.

I have made a short excursion into the new world which the Indian dwells in, or is. He begins where we leave off.

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon.

Any man knows when he is justified, and all the wits in the world cannot enlighten him on that point. The murderer always knows that he is justly punished; but when a government takes the life of a man without the consent of his conscience, it is an audacious government, and is taking a step towards its own dissolution.

There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon.

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

Loose the world, get lost in it, and find your soul.

The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile,... the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world.

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.

The only sin in the world is ignorance.

Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be.

When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?

Asked whether or not he believed in an afterlife, Thoreau quipped, "One world at a time."

Who could believe in the prophecies ... that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds.

The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.

Sometimes you have to leave the world in order to learn how to live in it. Thoreau shunned society, went to the woods, and came back with a new understanding of life.

It is very rare that you meet with obstacles in this world, which the humblest man has not faculties to surmount.

The world laughs in flowers.

The world rests on principles.

How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden.

When I hear a grown man or woman say, "Once I had faith in men, now I have not," I am inclined to ask, "Who are you whom the world has disappointed? Have not you rather disappointed the world?"

In the wilderness is the salvation of the world.

A little thought is sexton to all the world.

If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me.

There are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or inlet, yet unexplored by him.

I desire that there be as many different persons in the world as possible; I would have each one be very careful to find out and preserve his own way.

I am a citizen of the world first, and of this country at a later and more convenient hour.

Oh, one world at a time!

Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.

If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even,- for that is the seat of sympathy,-he forthwith sets about reforming the world.

Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted.

The scenery, when it is truly seen, reacts on the life of the seer. How to live. How to get the most of life.... How to extract its honey from the flower of the world.

In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.

The world, which the Greeks called Beauty, has been made such by being gradually divested of every ornament which was not fitted to endure.

Surely the writer is to address a world of laborers, and such therefore must be his own discipline.