Henry David Thoreau Philosophical Quotes

Writer, Philosopher

Philosophical

“In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,--not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!”

Men Children Nature

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Henry David Thoreau

Writer, Philosopher

Philosophical

“To one who habitually endeavors to contemplate the true state of things, the political state can hardly be said to have any existence whatever. It is unreal, incredible, and insignificant to him, and for him to endeavor to extract the truth from such lean material is like making sugar from linen rags, when sugar-cane may be had.”

Government Political Rags

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Philosophical

“Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.”

Powerful Humorous

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Philosophical

“Truth is always paradoxical.”

Truth Truth Is

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Philosophical

“As far back as I can remember I have unconsciously referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence.”

Remember States Reincarnation

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Philosophical

“Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any; rocks at least as well covered with lichens,and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome or Greece, Etruria or Carthage, or Egypt or Babylon, on these; are our cliffs bare?”

Country America Rocks

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Philosophical

“There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.”

Literature Doubt Finding The One

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Philosophical

“I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limit of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced.”

Truth Expression Fear

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Philosophical

“The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.”

Sea Lakes Fishing

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Philosophical

“Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?”

Air Flower Editing

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Philosophical

“When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat.”

Writing Mother Father

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Philosophical

“The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailors' Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather.”

Men Religious Taken

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Henry David Thoreau — Philosophical Quotes

Henry David Thoreau Quotes