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Book: Walden & Civil Disobedience
Quotes of Book: Walden & Civil Disobedience
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  1. Henry David Thoreau _ Walden & Civil Disobedience

    In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live.
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  2. Henry David Thoreau _ Walden & Civil Disobedience

    We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe.
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  3. Henry David Thoreau _ Walden & Civil Disobedience

    As for clothing, {...} perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. {...} No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.
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  4. Henry David Thoreau _ Walden & Civil Disobedience

    When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now.
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  5. Henry David Thoreau _ Walden & Civil Disobedience

    The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation; now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper.
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  6. Henry David Thoreau _ Walden & Civil Disobedience

    There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. {...} They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. {...} This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting.
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  7. Henry David Thoreau _ Walden & Civil Disobedience

    And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter – we never need read of another. {...} To a philosopher all "news", as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip.
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  8. Henry David Thoreau _ Walden & Civil Disobedience

    I cannot but feel compassion when I hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his 'furniture,' as whether it is insured or not. 'But what shall I do with my furniture?'...It would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run.
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  9. Henry David Thoreau _ Walden & Civil Disobedience

    If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that I know, and determined only by the discretion of those who put him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the State, he is soon permitted to go at large again.
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  10. Henry David Thoreau _ Walden & Civil Disobedience

    I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way...But lo! men have become the tools of their tools...We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb."
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  11. Henry David Thoreau _ Walden & Civil Disobedience

    After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.
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  12. Henry David Thoreau _ Walden & Civil Disobedience

    A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven.
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