Henry David Thoreau Quotations: Thinking & Thoughts
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
Some dreams are divine, as well as some waking thoughts.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?—The Maine Woods
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 penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper.—Walden
The prospect of the young is forward and unbounded, mingling the future with the present. In the declining day the thoughts make haste to rest in darkness, and hardly look forward to the ensuing morning. The thoughts of the old prepare for night and slumber. The same hopes and prospects are not for him who stands upon the rosy mountain-tops of life, and him who expects the setting of his earthly day.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
The vast machine may indeed roll over our toes, and we not know it, but it would rebound and be staved to pieces like an empty barrel, if it should strike fair and square on the smallest and least angular of a man's thoughts.—Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 26 September 1859
To the thinker, all institutions of men, as all imperfection, viewed from the point of equanimity, are legitimate subjects of humor.—"Thomas Carlyle and His Works"
Unpremeditated music is the true gauge which measures the current of our thoughts—the very undertow of our life's stream.—Journal, 18 August 1841
