Henry David Thoreau — Philosophical Quotes

716 quotes · Writer, Philosopher

Page 22 of 50

Henry David Thoreau Quotes

All Philosophical Wise Grateful Creative Spiritual 716 quotes · page 22 of 50

Henry David Thoreau

Writer, Philosopher

Philosophical

“If a man is rich and strong anywhere, it must be on his native soil. Here I have been these forty years learning the language of these fields that I may the better express myself. If I should travel to the prairies, I should much less understand them, and my past life would serve me but ill to describe them. Many a weed here stands for more of life to me than the big trees of California would if I should go there. We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.”

Strong Travel Weed

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Henry David Thoreau

Writer, Philosopher

Philosophical

“I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen.”

America Names Nature

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Philosophical

“I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.”

Nature Vision Awe

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Philosophical

“What the first philosopher taught the last will have to repeat.”

Firsts Lasts

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Philosophical

“To be awake is to be completely alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.”

Men Alive

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Philosophical

“We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste.”

Friendship Insult Haste

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Philosophical

“In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round,--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature.”

Men Eye Nature

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Philosophical

“Making a logging-road in the Maine woods is called "swamping" it, and they who do the work are called "swampers." I now perceivedthe fitness of the term. This was the most perfectly swamped of all the roads I ever saw. Nature must have coöperated with art here.”

Art Nature Swamps

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Philosophical

“It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world, the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.”

Men Years Art

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Philosophical

“The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea.”

Brother Air Sea

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Philosophical

“We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.”

Literature Treats Esteem

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Philosophical

“The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube.”

Change Lakes Ponds

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