"Where there is peace, God is." ~George Herbert

"Carve your blessings in stone." ~Anon
"I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again." ~William Penn
"Dictum sapienti sat est - A word to a wise person is sufficient." ~Cicero Ovid Seneca

"May your pen happily writes ...™ ©Leah C Dancel

10/29/10

HENRY DAVID THOREAU Quotes


"A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." ~Henry David Thoreau, American Writer, Philosopher, and Naturalist (1817-1862)

"A man [is] commonly a locked-up chest to us, to open whom, unless we have the key of sympathy, will make our hearts bleed." ~Henry David Thoreau in The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861

"A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will." ~Henry David Thoreau

"A person is rich in proportion to the things he or she can afford to let alone." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Again we took to the beach for another day, walking along the shore of the resounding sea, determined to get it into us. We wished to associate with the ocean until it lost the pond-like look which it wears to a countryman." ~Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist.

"All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant." ~Henry David Thoreau (lifted from Susan Deborah) 

“All misfortune is but a stepping stone to fortune.” ~Henry David Thoreau 

"All our lives want a suitable background... Character always secures for itself this advantage, and is thus distinct and unrelated to near or trivial objects whether things or persons." ~Henry David Thoreau

"All that was ripest and fairest in the wildness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of the wood thrush. It is the mediator between barbarism and civilization. It is unrepentant as Greece." ~Henry David Thoreau

"All this worldly wisdom was once the amiable heresy of some wise man." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Always maintain a kind of summer even in the middle of winter." ~Henry David Thoreau

"An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one." ~Henry David Thoreau from Civil Disobedience (1849)

"As a single footstep will not make a path on earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives." ~Henry David Thoreau

"As I come over the hill, I hear the wood thrush singing his evening lay. This is the only bird whose note affects me like music, affects the flow and tenor of my thoughts, my fancy and imagination. It lifts and exhilarates me. It is inspiring. It is a medicative draught to my soul. It is an elixir to my eyes and a fountain of youth to all my senses. It changes all hours to an eternal morning. It banishes all trivialness. It reinstates me in my dominion, makes me the lord of creation..." ~Henry David Thoreau

"As I love nature, as I love singing birds, and gleaming stubble, and flowing rivers, and morning and evening, and summer and winter, I love thee, my Friend."  ~Henry David Thoreau

"Be not simply good; be good for something." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else's idea of yourself should be." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Being free, being with nature, being yourself..." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes." ~Henry David Thoreau

“Direction is more important than speed. We are so busy looking at our speedometers that we forget the milestone.” ~Henry David Thoreau

"Dreams are the touchstones of our character." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Each new year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence...The voice of nature is always encouraging." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself." ~Henry David Thoreau 

"Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody." ~Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"Friends…They cherish one another’s hopes. They are kind to one another’s dreams." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Glances of true beauty can be seen in the faces of those who live in true meekness." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined." ~Henry Thoreau

"Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Goodness is the only investment that never fails." ~Henry David Thoreau

“He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads." ~Henry David Thoreau

"How vain it is to sit down and write when you have not stood up to live." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Humility, like darkness, reveals the heavenly lights. ~Henry David Thoreau

"I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoy,ent." ~Henry David Thoreau

"I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government." ~Henry David Thoreau

"I had three chairs in my house: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society." ~Henry David Thoreau

"I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized." ~Henry David Thoreau

“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.” ~Henry David Thoreau

"I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved..." ~Henry David Thoreau

"I make myself rich by making my wants few." ~Henry David Thoreau

"I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude." ~Henry David Thoreau from BrainyQuote

"I saw a delicate flower had grown two feet high between the horses' feet and the wheel track. An inch more to right or left had sealed its fate, or an inch higher. Yet it lived to flourish and never knew the danger incurred." ~Henry David Thoreau

"I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it." ~Henry David Thoreau

"I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least – and it is commonly more than that – sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements." ~Henry David Thoreau

"I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees." ~Henry David Thoreau

"I want to go soon and live away by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds. It will be success if I shall have left myself behind. But my friends ask what I will do when I get there. Will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons?" ~Henry David Thoreau

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." ~Henry David Thoreau

"I will wander further from what I have called my home - to the home which is forever inviting me. In such an hour the freedom of the woods is offered me, and the birds sing my dispensation. In dreams the links of life are united: we forget that our friends are dead; we know them as old." ~Henry David Thoreau

"If a man does not keep the pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured far away. ~Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." ~Henry David Thoreau

"If the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet scented herbs, more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success." ~Henry David Thoreau

"If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment." ~Henry David Thoreau

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line." ~Henry David Thoreau

"In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood." ~Henry David Thoreau

"It has come to this, - that the lover of art is one, and the lover of nature another, though true art is but the expression of our love of nature. It is monstrous when one cares but little about trees and much about Corinthian columns, and yet this is exceedingly common." ~Henry David Thoreau, Journal, October 9, 1957

"It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise." ~Henry David Thoreau

Germany courtesy by Precy Bierbaum
"It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man" ~Henry David Thoreau

"It is never too late to give up your prejudices." ~Henry David Thoreau

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." ~Henry David Thoreau

"It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow." ~From "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau

"It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination." ~Henry David Thoreau

"It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising; but, doubt now, it was of the last importance only to be present at it." ~Henry David Thoreau

"It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady." ~Henry David Thoreau

"It takes two to speak truth, one to speak and another to hear." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Kindness to children, love for children, goodness to children - these are the only investments that never fail." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact if I did not believe that something like this is prevailing tendency of my countrymen..." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Live free, child of the mist,—and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist." ~Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

FIJI APPLES 

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.” ~from WALDEN by Henry David Thoreau

"Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Looking through the stars to see if I could see God through them." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Men are probably nearer the central truth in their superstitions than in their science." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Men say they know many things;
But lo! they have taken wings, -
The arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances;
The wind that blows
Is all that any body knows."
~Henry David Thoreau

"Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame." ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

"Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Most of the luxuries, and manty of the so-called comforts, of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life." ~Henry David Thoreau

"My profession is to always find God in nature." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Nature is a tonic." ~Henry David Thoreau

“Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.” ~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, In Senses/Sight

"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves." ~Henry David Thoreau.

"Never look back unless you are planning to go that way" ~Henry David Thoreau

"Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short." ~Henry David Thoreau

“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. Nature puts no questions and answers none which we mortal ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.” ~Henry David Thoreau

"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves." ~Henry David Thoreau

“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.” ~Henry David Thoreau in a letter to Mrs. Emerson

"On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning." ~Henry David Thoreau

"One world at a time." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star." ~Henry David Thoreau from WALDEN (1854)

"Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Our life is frittered away by detail... Simplify, simplify." ~Henry David Thoreau 

"Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them." ~Henry David Thoreau


"Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolutions of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact. A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind." ~Henry David Thoreau

Grabbed from Look Out Echo Point

"Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Plainly the fox belongs to a different order of things from that which reigns in the village. Our courts, though they offer a bountry for his hide, and our pulpits, though they draw many a moral from his cunning, are in few senses contemporary with his free forest life." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Seldom that you can have a good fortune and a good sense ..." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?" ~Henry David Thoreau

"So behave that the odor of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere, that when we behold or scent a flower, we may not be reminded how inconsistent your deeds are with it; for all odor is but one form of advertisement of a moral quality, and if fair actions had not been performed, the lily would not smell sweet. The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light, -- to see its perfect success..." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Surely joy is the condition of life." ~Henry David Thoreau

"That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The beauty in man could only be preserved if we also preserve the beauty in nature." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The blue-bird carries the sky on his back." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunlight." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The language of friendship is not words but meanings." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation." ~from WALDEN by Henry David Thoreau (WALDEN was first published on this day in 1854.)

"The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?" ~Henry David Thoreau

"The perception of beauty is a moral test." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The question is not what you look at—but how you look and whether you see." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The world is but a canvas to the imagination." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them." ~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. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust." ~from WALDEN by Henry David Thoreau

"There can be no very black misery to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still." ~Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"There is no remedy for love but to love more." ~Henry David Thoreau

"There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself." ~Henry David Thoreau

"There seem to be two sides of this world, presented us at different times, as we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death. For seen in the eye of the poet, as God sees them, all things are alive and beautiful; but seen with the historical eye, or eye of the memory, they are dead and offensive. If we see Nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing, she is beautiful." ~Henry David Thoreau, Journal, March 13, 1842

"These are true mornings of creation, original and poetic days, not mere repetitions of the past. There is no lingering of yesterday's fogs, only such a mist as might have adorned the first morning." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Things do not change; we change." ~Henry David Thoreau

"This world is but canvas to our imaginations." ~Henry David Thoreau

“To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts.” ~Henry David Thoreau on Quality

"To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbours." ~Henry David Thoreau

"To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts." ~Henry David Thoreau

"True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance." ~Henry David Thoreau

“Truths and roses have thorns about them.” ~Henry David Thoreau

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?" ~from "Civil Disobedience" (1849) by Henry David Thoreau

"Waves of serene life pass over us from time to time like flakes of sunlight over the fields in cloudy weather." ~Henry David Thoreau

"We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than we stay in our chambers." ~Henry David Thoreau

"We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry." ~Henry David Thoreau

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn." ~Henry David Thoreau

"We need the tonic of wildness..."  ~Henry David Thoreau

"We were born to succeed, not to fail." ~Henry David Thoreau

"Wealth is the ability to fully experience life." ~Henry David Thoreau

"What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates his fate." ~Henry David Thoreau

"What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him." ~Henry David Thoreau

"When a dog runs at you, whistle for him." ~Henry David Thoreau

"When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop" ~ Henry David Thoreau

"While men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless." ~Henry David Thoreau

"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment." ~Henry David Thoreau

♥*✿*•♥═════════════♥*✿*•♥

BIO

Henry David Thoreau’s account of his adventure in self-reliance on the shores of a pond in Massachusetts—part social experiment, part spiritual quest—is an enduringly influential American classic. In 1845, Thoreau began building a cabin at Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. The inspiring and lyrical book that resulted is both a record of the two years Thoreau spent in withdrawal from society and a declaration of personal independence. By virtue of its casual, offhandedly brilliant wisdom and the easy splendor of its nature writing, Thoreau’s account of his immersion in solitude has become a signpost for the modern mind in an increasingly bewildering world. Also included in this edition is Thoreau’s famous essay, “Civil Disobedience,” inspired by his anti-war and anti-slavery sentiments, which has influenced nonviolent resistance movements around the world ever since.

Henry David Thoreau died in Concord, Massachusetts, on this day May 6, 1862 (aged 44).

╔═════ ೋღ☃ღೋ ═════╗
THANK YOU
╚═════ ೋღ☃ღೋ ═════╝