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The Thoreau Institute
at Walden Woods Library
Thoreau's
Life & Writings
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Henry D. Thoreau Quotation Pages
On Friendship
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I would that I were worthy to be
any man's Friend. [A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers]
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I love my friends
very much, but I find that it is of no use to go to see them. I hate
them commonly when I am near them. They belie themselves and deny me
continually. [Journal, 16 November 1851]
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I sometimes awake in the night and think
of friendship and its possibilities, a new life and revelation to me,
which perhaps I had not experienced for many months. . . . I wake up in
the night to these higher levels of life, as to a day that begins to
dawn, as if my intervening life had been a long night. I catch an echo
of the great strain of Friendship played somewhere, and feel compensated
for months and years of commonplace. I rise into a diviner atmosphere,
in which simply to exist and breathe is a triumph, and my thoughts
inevitably tend toward the grand and infinite, as aeronauts report that
there is ever an upper current hereabouts which sets toward the ocean.
If they rise high enough they go out to sea, and behold the vessels
seemingly in mid-air like themselves. It is as if I were serenaded, and
the highest and truest compliments were paid me. The universe gives me
three cheers. [Journal, 13 July 1857]
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The only danger in Friendship is
that it will end. [A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers]
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There are times when we have had
enough even of our Friends. [A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers]
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To say that a man is your Friend
means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy. [A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers]
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I have never met with a friend
who furnished me sea-room. I have only tacked a few times and come to anchor—not
sailed—made no voyage, carried no venture. [Journal
24 August 1852]
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My friend is one who takes me for what
I am. A stranger takes me for something else than what I am. . . .
What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the
virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other
warm. It brings men together in crowds and mobs in bar-rooms and
elsewhere, but it does not deserve the name of virtue. [Journal,
23 October 1852]
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Even
the death of Friends will inspire us as much as their lives. They will
leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray
the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted
over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are
overgrown with moss; for our Friends have no place in the graveyard. [A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers]
A
Note on the Text:
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Source:
Unless otherwise noted, quotations are from The Writings of Henry
David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906)
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