Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

Bankruptcy and repudiation are the spring-boards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine.

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.

What is once well done is done forever.

I'd rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion

It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.

I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind.

I value and trust those w^ho love and praise my aspiration rather than my performance.

Thoreau thought obsessively about time and the various ways it could be manipulated by writing; he collapses the two years he spent at Walden into one for the sake of "convenience," but surely also for the sake of artistry.

One large bundle held their all—bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens—all but the cat; she took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last.

The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We

What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more.

It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal heat; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us—and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without—Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and absorbed.