Henry David Thoreau Quotations: READING, WRITING & WRITERS
A book should be so true as to be intimate and familiar to all men as the sun to their faces. Such a word as is occasionally uttered to a companion in the woods in summer, and both are silent.—Journal, 4 September 1841
A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book.—Journal, 28 December 1852
A truly good book attracts very little favor to itself. It is so true that it teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down and commence living on its hint. —Journal, 19 February 1841
A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile, as a fungus or a lichen.—Journal, 16 November 1850
A well-built sentence, in the rapidity and force with which it works, may be compared to a modern corn planter, which furrows out, drops the seed, and covers it up at one movement.—Journal, 5 January 1842.
A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself.—Walden
After all, I believe it is the style of thought entirely, and the style of expression, which makes the difference in books.—Journal, 23 March 1842
Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the spectator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
As Anacreon says "the works of men shine," so the sounds of men and birds are musical.—Journal, 8 March 1853
