Quotes from Henry David Thoreau
Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.
- Henry David Thoreau
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
- Henry David Thoreau
I am struck by the simplicity of light in the atmosphere in the autumn, as if the earth absorbed none, and out of this profusion of dazzling light came the autumnal tints.
- Henry David Thoreau
My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.
- Henry David Thoreau
There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.
- Henry David Thoreau
By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
- Henry David Thoreau
Oh, one world at a time!
- Henry David Thoreau
The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.
- Henry David Thoreau
To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.
- Henry David Thoreau
Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.
- Henry David Thoreau
Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!
- Henry David Thoreau
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
- Henry David Thoreau