Henry David Thoreau Quotations: RELATIONSHIPS
I am glad to hear that any words of mine, though spoken so long ago that I can hardly claim identity with their author, have reached you. It gives me pleasure, because I have therefore reason to suppose that I have uttered what concerns men, and that it is not in vain that man speaks to man. This is the value of literature.—Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 27 March 1848
I am not alone if I stand by myself.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
I am probably the greatest walker in Concord,—to its disgrace be it said.—Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 13 March 1856
I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.—"Civil Disobedience"Â
I cannot but believe that acorns were intended to be the food of man. They are agreeable to the palate as the mother's milk to the babe.—Journal, 8 October 1851
I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me that, by the want of pecuniary wealth, I have been nailed down to this my native region so long and steadily, and made to study and love this spot of earth more and more. What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering? The traveler's is but a barren and comfortless condition. Wealth will not buy a man a home in nature-house nor farm there. The man of business does not by his business earn a residence in nature, but is denaturalized rather.—Journal, 12 November 1853
I cannot see the bottom of the sky, because I cannot see to the bottom of myself. It is the symbol of my own infinity.—Journal, 23 June 1840
I catch an echo of the great strain of Friendship played somewhere, and feel compensated for months and years of commonplace.—Journal, 13 July 1857
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
