Henry
David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
American poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, surveyor,
historian, author of Walden and Civil Disobedience
(1817-1862)
"I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees."
"A man's interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town."
“He will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet.”
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the roots.”
~from Walden, his autobiography
“Our lives are frittered away by detail. …simplify, simplify.”
"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."
“I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual improvement to leave off eating animals.”
“One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”
“It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.”
“It's not what you look at that matters; it's what you see.”
“If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.”
