Of Interest

NULL

The Henry D. Thoreau Quotation Page: Books and Reading
  • A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land. [A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers]
  • Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. [A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers]
  • After all, I believe it is the style of thought entirely, and the style of expression, which makes the difference in books. [Journal, 23 March 1842]
  • Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside. [Thoreau to B.B. Wiley, 26 April 1857]
  • Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. [Walden]
  • How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. [Walden]
  •  A truly good book attracts very little favor to itself. It is so true that it teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down and commence living on its hint. When I read an indifferent book, it seems the best thing I can do, but the inspiring volume hardly leaves me leisure to finish its latter pages. It is slipping out of my fingers while I read. It creates no atmosphere in which it may be perused, but one in which its teachings may be practiced. It confers on me such wealth that I lay it down with regret. What I began by reading I must finish by acting. [Journal, 19 February 1841] 
  • It is remarkable, but on the whole, perhaps, not to be lamented, that the world is so unkind to a new book. Any distinguished traveler who comes to our shores is likely to get more dinners and speeches of welcome than he can well dispose of, but the best books, if noticed at all, meet with coldness and suspicion, or, what is worse, gratuitous, off-hand criticism. ["Thomas Carlyle and His Works"]
  • It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. [Walden]
  • He who cannot read is worse than deaf and blind, is yet but half alive, is still-born. [Journal, 10 March 1856] 
  • Books, not which affords us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institutions—such I call good books. [A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers] 
  • Many college text-books which were a weariness and a stumbling-block when studied, I have since read a little in with pleasure and profit. [Journal, 19 February 1854] 
  • If men were to be destroyed and the books they have written were to be transmitted to a new race of creatures, in a new world, what kind of record would be found in them of so remarkable a phenomenon as the rainbow? [Journal, 13 March 1859] 
  • The woodchopper reads the wisdom of the ages recorded on the paper that holds his dinner, then lights his pipe with it. When we ask for a scrap of paper for the most trivial use, it may have the confessions of Augustine or the sonnets of Shakespeare, and we not observe it. The student kindles his fire, the editor packs his trunk, the sportsman loads his gun, the traveler wraps his dinner, the Irishman papers his shanty, the schoolboy peppers the plastering, the belle pins up her hair, with the printed thoughts of men. [Journal, 10 March 1856] 
  • The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life. [Walden] 
  • The Library is a wilderness of books. [Journal, 16 March 1852] 
  • There is always room and occasion enough for a true book on any subject; as there is room for more light the brightest day and more rays will not interfere with the first. [A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers]

    A Note on the Text: Unless otherwise noted, quotations are from The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906) 

Emerson's library (Photographer: Alfred W. Hosmer, from the Paul Brooks Collection)

Things do not change; we change. — Walden

More Quotations