I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pa...
When he read James Wilkinson's book The Human Body in 1851, Thoreau was impressed. Wilkinson's book, he wrote in his journal, to some extent realizes what I have dreamed of, -a return to the primitive...
Those who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts.
There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands.
The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but it is instinct.
The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob, before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his crowd which inspire the orato...
The fate of the country... does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.
The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as...
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the...
Morning is when I'm awake, and there is dawn in me.
Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they ma...
Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or streeet, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows, morning and ev...
In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood
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 travelled the farthest over the...
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is...
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind...
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.