The Portable Thoreau Quotes

“As for Doing-good...I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“In our daily intercourse with men, our nobler faculties are dormant and suffered to rust. None will pay us the compliment to expect nobleness from us. Though we have gold to give, they demand only copper.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“Now he has not laid aside the sword of the spirit, for he is pure spirit himself, and his sword is pure spirit also.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“Men will tell you sometimes that “money’s hard.” That shows it was not made to eat, I say.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“It is a momentous fact that a man may be good, or he may be bad; his life may be true, or it may be false; it may be either a shame or a glory to him. The good man builds himself up; the bad man destroys himself”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. I sympathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me,—some of its virus mingled with my blood. No,—in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“Men say, practically, Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought go about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this strain, I should say rather, Set about being good. As if the sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the meanwhile too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about him getting good.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“Only they who go to soirées and legislative halls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“We seem to have forgotten that the expression “a liberal education” originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely was considered worthy of slaves only. But taking a hint from the word, I would go a step further, and say that it is not the man of wealth and leisure simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a true sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and free man.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. But I would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him who does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life, I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;” and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself;
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye;
And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe’er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou’st distinguished me;
That my weak hand may equal my firm faith,
And my life practice more than my tongue saith;
That my low conduct may not show,
Nor my relenting lines,
That I thy purpose did not know,
Or overrated thy designs.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“Of all the men who were said to be my contemporaries, it seemed to me that John Brown was the only one who had not died. I never hear of a man named Brown now,—and I hear of them pretty often,—I never hear of any particularly brave and earnest man, but my first thought is of John Brown, and what relation he may be to him. I meet him at every turn. He is more alive than ever he was. He has earned immortality. He is not confined to North Elba nor to Kansas. He is no longer working in secret. He works in public, and in the clearest light that shines on this land.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something. All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent enjoy the story. Let nothing come between you and the light. Respect men and brothers only. When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God,—none of the servants. In what concerns you much do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“If thou art a writer, write as if thy time were short, for it is indeed short at the longest. Improve each occasion when thy soul is reached. Drain the cup of inspiration to its last dregs.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“To-day you may write a chapter on the advantages of travelling, and to-morrow you may write another chapter on the advantages of not travelling….
It is fatal to the writer to be too much possessed by his thought. Things must lie a little remote to be described.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“My Friend is not of some other race or family of men, but flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. He is my real brother. I see his nature groping yonder so like mine. We do not live far apart. Have not the fates associated us in many ways? It says, in the Vishnu Purana: “Seven paces together is sufficient for the friendship of the virtuous, but thou and I have dwelt together.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“Yet, as an Oriental philosopher has said, “Although Friendship between good men is interrupted, their principles remain unaltered. The stalk of the lotus may be broken, and the fibres remain connected.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau

“But sometimes we are said to love another, that is, to stand in a true relation to him, so that we give the best to, and receive the best from, him. Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love; and in proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau