Henry David Thoreau Quotations: THOUGHTS & OPINIONS
If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.—Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 27 March 1848
In the night the eyes are partly closed or retire into the head. Other senses take the lead. The walker is guided as well by the sense of smell. Every plant and field and forest emits its odor now, swamp-pink in the meadow and tansy in the road; and there is the peculiar dry scent of corn which has begun to show its tassels.—Cape Cod
It is fatal to the writer to be too much possessed by his thought. Things must lie a little remote to be described.—Journal, 11 November 1851
It is the individual and private that demands our sympathies.—Cape Cod
It seems to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.—Journal, 11 April 1852
Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer’s requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world.—Walden
My thought is part of the meaning of the world, and hence I use a part of the world as a symbol to express my thought.—Journal, 4 November 1852
Not how is the idea expressed in stone, or on canvas or paper, is the question, but how far it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me as my own thoughts.—Journal, 10 July 1840
On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have hence forth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world. —Journal, 28 February 1840
