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Henry David Thoreau Quotes - Page 53

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There is always some accident in the best things, whether thoughts or expressions or deeds. The memorable thought, the happy expression, the admirable deed are only partly ours.

There is always some accident in the best things, whether thoughts or expressions or deeds. The memorable thought, the happy expression, the admirable deed are only partly ours.

Henry David Thoreau
Art, Philosophy, Memorable
Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.207, Courier Corporation

The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly.

Henry David Thoreau
Dinner, Language, Parables
Henry David Thoreau (2004). “Walden: 150th Anniversary Illustrated Edition of the American Classic”, p.238, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knolwedge, Grammatica parda, tawny grammar, a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

Henry David Thoreau
Mother, Children, Knowledge

We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.

Henry David Thoreau
Reading, Light, Space
Henry David Thoreau (2017). “HENRY DAVID THOREAU – The Man, The Philosopher & The Trailblazer (Illustrated): Biographies, Memoirs, Autobiographical Books & Personal Letters (Including Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, A Yankee in Canada…)”, p.133, e-artnow

Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.

Henry David Thoreau
Wall, Thinking, Air
Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.549, Simon and Schuster

If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world's inheritance,... these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story.

Henry David Thoreau
Art, Men, Light
Henry David Thoreau (2017). “The Most Alive is the Wildest – Thoreau’s Complete Works on Living in Harmony with the Nature: Walden, Walking, Night and Moonlight, The Highland Light, A Winter Walk, The Maine Woods, A Walk to Wachusett, The Landlord, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Autumnal Tints, Wild Apples…”, p.342, e-artnow

All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences.

Henry David Thoreau
History, Shadow, Events
Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.208, Xist Publishing

We perceive that the schemers return again and again to common sense and labor. Such is the evidence of history.

Henry David Thoreau
History, Common Sense, Reform
Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.88, Xist Publishing

In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, "memoirs to serve for a history," which is but materials to serve for a mythology.

Henry David Thoreau
Hands, History, Greek
Henry David Thoreau (1975). “Early Essays and Miscellanies”, p.60, Princeton University Press

The sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust and confusion; and when we meet with any cheering fact which implies the presence of this luminary, we excerpt and modernize it.

Henry David Thoreau
Cheer, Dust, History
Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.549, Simon and Schuster

Such were garrulous and noisy eras, which no longer yield any sound, but the Grecian or silent and melodious era is ever soundingand resounding in the ears of men.

Henry David Thoreau
Men, Yield, History
Henry David Thoreau (2014). “The Illustrated "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"”, p.392, Princeton University Press

Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veilhangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating.

Henry David Thoreau
Heart, Past, Men
Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.109, Xist Publishing

Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted,but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.

Henry David Thoreau
Moon, Eclipse Of The Sun, History
Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.91, Xist Publishing

There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.

Henry David Thoreau
Truth, History, Secret
Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.88, Xist Publishing

History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning ofthings, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,--when did burdock and plantain sprout first?

Henry David Thoreau
Knowledge, History, Doe
Henry David Thoreau (2017). “HENRY DAVID THOREAU - Ultimate Collection: 6 Books, 26 Essays & 60+ Poems, Including Translations. Biographies & Letters (Illustrated): Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, A Yankee in Canada, Canoeing in the Wilderness, Civil Disobedience, Slavery in Massachusetts, Life Without Principle, Excursions, Poems of Nature, Familiar Letters…”, p.1447, e-artnow

There has always been the same amount of light in the world. The new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses, do not affect thegeneral illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them.

Henry David Thoreau
Stars, Knowledge, Glasses
Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.110, Xist Publishing

The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality.

Henry David Thoreau
Nature, Truth, Law
Henry David Thoreau (1862). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. By Henry D. Thoreau”, p.381

You speak of poverty and dependence. Who are poor and dependent? Who are rich and independent? When was it that men agreed to respect the appearance and not the reality?

Henry David Thoreau
Truth, Independent, Reality
Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.361, Penguin

Exaggeration! was ever any virtue attributed to a man without exaggeration? was ever any vice, without infinite exaggeration? Do we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves, or do we recognize ourselves for the actual men we are? Are we not all great men? Yet what are we actually, to speak of? We live by exaggeration.

Henry David Thoreau
Truth, Men, Vices
Henry David Thoreau (2017). “HENRY DAVID THOREAU - Ultimate Collection: 6 Books, 26 Essays & 60+ Poems, Including Translations. Biographies & Letters (Illustrated): Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, A Yankee in Canada, Canoeing in the Wilderness, Civil Disobedience, Slavery in Massachusetts, Life Without Principle, Excursions, Poems of Nature, Familiar Letters…”, p.1380, e-artnow

What do the botanists know? Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon, and stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least.

Henry David Thoreau
Life, Stars, Eye
Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.286, Delphi Classics

The cheapest way to travel, and the way to travel the farthest in the shortest distance, is to go afoot, carrying a dipper, a spoon, and a fish line, some Indian meal, some salt, and some sugar.... Any one of these things I mean, not all together. I have traveled thus some hundreds of miles without taking any meal in a house, sleeping on the ground when convenient, and found it cheaper, and in many respects more profitable, than staying at home. So that some have inquired why it would not be best to travel always. But I never thought of traveling simply as a means of getting a livelihood.

Henry David Thoreau
Life, Travel, Distance

The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere makeshifts, and a shirking of the real business of life,--chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better.

Henry David Thoreau
Life, Real, Work
Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Selected Essays of Henry David Thoreau”, p.230, Simon and Schuster

It is not enough that our life is an easy one. We must live on the stretch, retiring to our rest like soldiers on the eve of a battle, looking forward to the strenuous sortie of the morrow.

Henry David Thoreau
Life, Struggle, Soldier
Henry David Thoreau (2007). “My Thoughts Are Murder to the State: Thoreau's Essays on Political Philosophy”, p.163, David M Gross

Certainly, we do not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. He who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap.

Henry David Thoreau
Children, Reading, Naps
Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.67, Xist Publishing

When we consider the weak and nerveless periods of some literary men, who perchance in feet and inches come up to the standard oftheir race, and are not deficient in girth also, we are amazed at the immense sacrifice of thews and sinews. What! these proportions, these bones,--and this their work! Hands which could have felled an ox have hewed this fragile matter which would not have tasked a lady's fingers! Can this be a stalwart man's work, who has a marrow in his back and a tendon Achilles in his heel?

Henry David Thoreau
Women, Sacrifice, Feet
Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.996, Delphi Classics

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