Henry David Thoreau Quotations: RELATIONSHIPS
Today you may write a chapter on the advantages of traveling, and tomorrow you may write another chapter on the advantages of not traveling.—Journal, 11 November 1851
Treat your friends for what you know them to be—regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did, but what they intended.—Journal, 31 December 1851
We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outsides of freedom, the means and outmost defenses of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be essentially free.—Journal, 16 February 1851
We are constantly invited to be what we are; as to something worthy and noble. I never waited but for myself to come round; none ever detained me, but I lagged or tagged after myself.—Journal, 2 February 1841
We can possibly get along with a neighbor, even with a bedfellow, whom we respect but very little; but as soon as it comes to this, that we do not respect ourselves, then we do not get along at all.—Thoreau to H. G. O. Blake, 10 April 1853
We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.—Walden
We have the silver and the golden birch. This is like a fair, flaxen-haired sister of the dark-complexioned black birch, with golden ringlets. How lustily it takes hold of the swampy soil, and braces itself! And here flows a dark cherry-wood or wine-colored brook over the iron-red sands in the somber swamp,—swampy wine. In an undress, this tree. Ah, time will come when these will be all gone.—Journal, 4 January 1853
We inspire friendship in men when we have contracted friendship with the gods.—Journal, June 1850
We like to read a good description of no thing so well as that which we already know the best, as our friend, or ourselves even.—Journal, 13 October 1860
We love to talk with those who can make a good guess at us—not with those who talk to us as if we were somebody else all the while.—Journal, 9 September 1852
