Best 6 quotes of Thoreau on MyQuotes

But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language in which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. 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? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

it behooves us old stagers to keep our lamps trimmed and burning to the last, and not trust to the sun’s looming. Thoreau, Henry David. The Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau: Canoeing in the Wilderness, Walden, Walking, Civil Disobedience and More (Kindle Locations 12226-12227). . Kindle Edition.

It is life near the bone where it is sweetest.

No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety commonly to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. [...] I sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this,--Who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it [...] for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected.

Read not the Times, read the Eternities.

What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. ... Such a rule ... draws lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular daily behaviors ... where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character.