Henry David Thoreau Quotations: READING, WRITING & WRITERS
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!—Journal, 19 August 1851
However much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds.—Walden
I am glad to hear that any words of mine, though spoken so long ago that I can hardly claim identity with their author, have reached you. It gives me pleasure, because I have therefore reason to suppose that I have uttered what concerns men, and that it is not in vain that man speaks to man. This is the value of literature.—Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 27 March 1848
I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him—my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words.—Walden
I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region.—"Life without Principle"
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 omit the unusual, the hurricanes & earthquakes, and describe the common. This has the greatest charm and is the true theme of poetry.—Journal, 28 August 1851
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
