Henry David Thoreau Quotations: Scholars
The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality; the best of the Hindoo Scripture, for its pure intellectuality. The reader is nowhere raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagvat-Geeta.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
The scholar is not apt to make his most familiar experience come gracefully to the aid of his expression.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
The scholar might frequently emulate the propriety and emphasis of the farmer’s call to his team, and confess that if that were written it would surpass his labored sentences. Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month’s labor in the farmer’s almanac, to restore our tone and spirits. A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
The scholar requires hard and serious labor to give an impetus to his thought. He will learn to grasp the pen firmly so, and wield it gracefully and effectively, as an axe or a sword.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
The scholar's and the farmers's work are strictly analogous. . . . He is doing like myself. My barn-yard is my journal.—Journal, 20 January 1852
The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.—Walden
There are new and patented inventions in this shape, purporting to be for the elevation of the race, which many a pure scholar and genius who has learned to read is for a moment deceived by, and finds himself reading a horse-rake, or spinning-jenny, or wooden nutmeg, or oak-leaf cigar, or steam-power press, or kitchen range, perchance, when he was seeking serene and biblical truths.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.—Walden
We do not learn by inference and deduction, and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.—"Natural History of Massachusetts"
