Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Now it is human nature to want to eat to ones fill when hungry, to want to warm up when cold, to want to rest when tired. These all are a part of people's emotional nature.

Without civilization, we would not turn into animals, but vegetables.

He chose to be rich by making his wants few, and supplying them himself.

Basically, we are all chimps. The human side is at the front of our forehead, but the chimp is the part that lashes out. When I play, I am completely chimp-orientated.

The policy of man consists, at first, in endeavoring to arrive at a state equal to that of animals, whom nature has furnished with food, clothing, and shelter.

The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

He who is plenteously provided for from within needs but little from without.

This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.

I think it's hard for people to suspend the era they live in and understand the decisions that had to be made often during the western frontier era were life and death. You had to be resourceful and on your feet to try to figure out somebody. You didn't have the benefit of knowing who somebody was.

What I mean by living to one's self is living in the world, as in it, not of it.

Feeling fear is a good sign that your survival instincts are intact. You need to appreciate the dangers to stay safe.

Maybe we didn't have many possessions, but we never went hungry, were cold, or lacked love.

Let him make use of instinct who cannot make use of reason.

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.

When a man is starving in the streets he is not thinking of bread and water, but of caviar and champagne!

One of the greatest myths of all time is that so-called civilized man is no longer an animal, and for that reason can strive to disarm himself and grow fat with false concepts.

We may prefer to think of ourselves as fallen angels, but in reality we are rising apes.

One whose chief regard is for his own mind, and for the divinity within him and the service of its goodness, will strike no poses, utter no complaints, and crave neither for solitude nor yet for a crowd. Best of all, his life will be free from continual pursuing and avoiding.

We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense to the government. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone.

Hunger, love, pain, fear are some of those inner forces which rule the individual's instinct for self preservation.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.

A lofty sense of independence is, in man, the best privilege of his nature.

Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.

What a friend we have in a tree, the tree is the symbol of hope, self improvement and what people can do for themselves.

True security lies not in the things one has, but in the things one can do without.