Henry David Thoreau Quotations: RELATIONSHIPS
The senses of children are unprofaned. Their whole body is one sense. They take a physical pleasure in riding on a rail.—Journal, 7 July 1851
The voices of school children sound like spring.—Journal, 9 February 1854
There are enough who will flatter me with sweet words, and anon use bitter ones to balance them, but they are not my friends. Simple sincerity and truth are rare indeed.—Journal, 9 September 1852
There are infinite degrees of life, from that which is next to sleep and death, to that which is forever awake and immortal. We must not confound man and man. We cannot conceive of a greater difference than between the life of one man and that of another.—Journal, 13 January 1857
There are times when we have had enough even of our Friends.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
There is a stronger desire to be respectable to one's neighbors than to one's self.—Journal, 1845-1846
There would be this advantage in traveling in your own country, even in your own neighborhood, that you would be so thoroughly prepared to understand what you saw you would make fewer traveler's mistakes.—Journal, 12 June 1851
This is a common experience in my traveling. I plod along, thinking what a miserable world this is and what miserable fellows we that inhabit it, wondering what it is tempts men to live in it; but anon I leave the towns behind and am lost in some boundless heath, and life becomes gradually more tolerable, if not even glorious.—Journal, 17 June 1857
This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.—Walden
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
