Henry David Thoreau Quotations: Literature, Books & Reading
I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.—Journal, February 1851
I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
I kept Homer’s Iliad on my table through the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then.—Walden
I should like to keep some book of natural history always by me as a sort of elixir, the reading of which would restore the tone of my system and secure me true and cheerful views of life.—Journal, 31 December 1841
I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen.—"Walking"
I would rather write books than lectures.—Journal, 6 December 1854
If men were to be destroyed and the books they have written were to be transmitted to a new race of creatures, in a new world, what kind of record would be found in them of so remarkable a phenomenon as the rainbow?—Journal, 13 March 1859
In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has traveled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home.—Journal, 20 November 1857
In comparison with the philosophers of the East, we may say that modern Europe has yet given birth to none. Beside the vast and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, even our Shakespeare seems sometimes youthfully green and practical merely.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat–Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions.—Walden
