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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 Books and Reading
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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, "Sunday"]
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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]
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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 "Sunday"]
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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]
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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]
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Books are the treasured wealth
of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. [Walden
"Reading"]
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How many a man has dated a new
era in his life from the reading of a book. [Walden]
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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"]
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It is not all books that are as
dull as their readers. [Walden
"Reading"]
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He who cannot read
is worse than deaf and blind, is yet but half alive, is still-born.
[Journal, 10 March 1856]
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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, "Sunday"]
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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]
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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]
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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]
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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 "Reading"]
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The Library is a
wilderness of books. [Journal, 16 March 1852]
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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, "Sunday"]
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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Report
errors to the
Curator of
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