Henry David Thoreau Quotes

There is virtue in country houses, in gardens and orchards, in fields, streams and groves, in rustic recreations and plain manners, that neither cities nor universities enjoy.

I practically lived in the woods when I was a kid, avoiding grown-ups and my dysfunctional family, pretending I was half-wolf, a feral child who napped in nests made out of ferns, ate wild blueberries, and wove sticks and feathers into her hair.

For work, I have to be living in cities, I really cherish the time when I get to be out in the countryside.

I definitely hope to relax when I get back hope. I will disappear into the forest and be rejuvenated by the beauty of the mountains.

You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

Remote though your farm may be, It's something to be the lord of one green lizard-and free.

Way across the country where the hillside mountains glide, the dynamo of your smile caressed the barefoot virgin child.

Keep your libraries, your penal institutions, your insaneasylums... give me beer.You think man needs rule, he needs beer. The world does not need morals, it needs beer... The souls of men have been fed with indigestibles, but the soul could make use of beer.

At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned

Life is always uncertain,'he said with a shrug. 'We cannot let the fear of what might happen stop us living as we choose.

I hike a lot. The view and the air up in the hills are much greater than the hustle and bustle of the city. It makes it all look so silly and small.

I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds, and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasures of this gaycapital [Paris].

An ordinary hole beside a path through the woods might begin to open to altered worlds.

He who lives as children live - who does not struggle for his bread and does not believe that his actions possess any ultimate significance - remains childlike.

You have to be able to face losing some things you might want in order to be free to do the right thing.

When time and need require, we should resist with all our might, and prefer death to slavery and disgrace.

I would contend that we place no other value above the right to be free. We will die for our freedom. In fact, we believe freedom is sufficiently important that we will even die so that others around the globe might be free.

Honestly, I do not experience fear in the mountains. On the contraryI feel my shoulders straightening, squaring, like the birds as they straighten their wings. I enjoy the freedom and the altitude. It is only when I return to life below that I feel the world's weight on my shoulders.

When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.

Swords were given to men, that none might be Slaves, but such as know not how to use them.

The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships.

He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato.