Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live.

I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority.

Not all books are as dull as their readers.

I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in.

Have you got in your wood for this winter? What else have you got in? Of what use a great fire on the hearth, and a confounded little fire in the heart?

Books which are books are all that you want, and there are but half a dozen in any thousand.

Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth.

Not that the story need to be long, but it will take a long time to shorten it.

If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated.

I have come to this hill to see the sun go down, to recover sanity and put myself again in relation with Nature.

Who shall distinguish between the law by which a brook finds its river, the instinct by which a bird performs its migrations, and the knowledge by which a man steers his ship round the globe? The globe is the richer for the variety of its inhabitants.