Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

It is the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us. The question is not what you look at but what you see.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone? We

for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly;

By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down.

It is a very remarkable and significant fact that though no man is quite well or healthy yet every one believes practically that health is the rule & disease the exception.

We should be men first, and subjects afterward.