Henry David Thoreau Quotes

A gun gives you the body, not the bird.

I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada, not having seen much; what I got by going to Canada was a cold.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense?

Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full.

I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.

We can never have enough of nature. . . .We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

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 come in contact with the more civilized.

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.