Henry David Thoreau Quotations: MORALS & VALUES
How many men have you seen that did not belong to any sect, or party, or clique.—Journal, 9 August 1858
How much virtue there is in simply seeing!—Journal, 10 April 1840
How often are we wise as serpents without being harmless as doves!—Journal, 9 February 1851
I am not alone if I stand by myself.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
I am soothed by the rain-drops on the door-sill; every globule that pitches thus confidently from the eaves to the ground is my life insurance.—Journal, 14 November 1839
I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.—Journal, 15 March 1854
I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him—my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words.—Walden
I begin to see how that the preparation for all issues is to do so virtuously.—Journal, 19 February 1842
I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.—Thoreau to H. G. O. Blake, 27 March 1848
I had another friend, who, through a slight obtuseness, perchance, did not recognize a fact which the dignity of friendship would by no means allow me to descend so far as to speak of, and yet the inevitable effect of that ignorance was to hold us apart forever.—Journal, 4 March 1856
