Henry David Thoreau Quotations: Religion & Religions
In the last stage of civilization, Poetry, Religion and Philosophy will be one.—Journal, 17 December 1837
Listen to music religiously as if it were the last strain you might hear.—Journal, 12 June 1851
Men invite the devil in at every angle and then prate about the garden of Eden and the fall of man.—Journal, 5 November 1855
That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.—Walden
The best man's spirit makes a fearful sprite to haunt his tomb. The ghost of a priest is no better than that of a highwayman.—Journal, 23 December 1841
The bigoted and sectarian forget that without religion or devotion of some kind nothing great was ever accomplished.—Journal, 27 July 1852
The earth song of the cricket! Before Christianity was, it is. Health, health, health, is the burden of its song.—Journal, 17 June 1852
The entertaining a single thought of a certain elevation makes all men of one religion. It is always some base alloy that creates the distinction of sects.—Journal, 8 August 1852
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 philosophy and poetry and religion of such a mankind are not worth the dust of a puffball.—"Life without Principle"
