Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreauwas an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Resistance to Civil Government, an argument for disobedience to an unjust state...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth12 July 1817
CountryUnited States of America
insanity house hospitals
Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always. Every house is, in this sense, a hospital.
courage morning three
The three-o'-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest.
book culture literature
The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell.
family art struggle
We have built for this world a family mansion, and the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.
encouraging needs praise
We begin to praise when we begin to see a thing needs our assistance.
women talking pleasure
I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman simply because she has regular features.
interesting farming poor
Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.
spiritual gratitude men
The prosaic man sees things badly, or with the bodily sense; but the poet sees them clad in beauty, with the spiritual sense.
gratitude people why-not
We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect. [So why not suspect good rather than bad in events, people and life and thereby find it more?]
gratitude grateful looks
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see - i.e. compare it to, something worse or better, that determines whether you are respectively grateful and happy or ungrateful and bitter.
gratitude grateful i-am-grateful
I am grateful for what I have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.
gratitude grateful book
A journal, is a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstasy, what you are grateful for.
wise taken men
Probe the universe in a myriad of points. ... He is a wise man who has taken many views; to whom stones and plants and animals and a myriad of objects have each suggesting something, contributed something.
ocean land water
Before the land rose out of the ocean, and became dry land, chaos reigned; and between high and low water mark, where she is partially disrobed and rising, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures can inhabit.