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The Henry D. Thoreau Quotation Page: Friendship
  • I would that I were worthy to be any man's Friend. [A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers]
  • 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]
  • 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]
  • The only danger in Friendship is that it will end. [A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers]
  • There are times when we have had enough even of our Friends. [A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers]
  • 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]
  • 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]
  • 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]
  • 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: Unless otherwise noted, quotations are from The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906)

 

Lady's-slippers (Photographer: Herbert Gleason, from The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, 1906)

I feel blessed. I love my life. — Journal, 1 November 1851

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