What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
—WaldenWhat is called the religious world very generally deny virtue to all who have not received the Gospel.
—Journal, 4 December 1860What is hope, what is expectation, but a seed-time whose harvest cannot fail, an irresistible expedition of the mind, at length to be victorious?
—Journal, 20 February 1857What is Nature unless there is an eventful human life passing within her?
—Journal, 2 November 1853What is produced by a free stroke charms us, like the forms of lichens and leaves. There is a certain perfection in accidents which we never consciously attain.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversÂWhat is the great attraction in cities? It is universally admitted that human beings invariably degenerate there and do not propagate their kind. Yet the prevailing tendency is to the city life, whether we move to Boston or stay in Concord.
—Journal, 1845-1846What is the singing of birds, or any natural sound, compared with the voice of one we love?
—Journal, 30 April 1851What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?
—Thoreau to H. G. O. Blake, 20 May 1860What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom?
—Journal, 16 February 1851What is this heaven which they expect, if it is no better than they expect? Are they prepared for a better than they can now imagine?
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversÂWhat is wanted is men of principle, who recognize a higher law than the decision of the majority. The marines and the militia whose bodies were used lately were not men of sense nor of principle; in a high moral sense they were not men at all.
—Journal, 9 June 1854What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity—who recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority.
—"Slavery in Massachusetts"What makes the United States government, on the whole, more tolerable,—I mean for us lucky white men, —is the fact that there is so much less government with us.
—"A Yankee in Canada"What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm. It brings men together in crowds and mobs in bar-rooms and elsewhere, but it does not deserve the name of virtue.
—Journal, 23 October 1852