Quotes From "Walking" By Henry David Thoreau

A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself--and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light of common day. Henry David Thoreau

Wildness is the preservation of the World. Henry David Thoreau

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair as that into which the Sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays. Henry David Thoreau

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man -- a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit. Henry David Thoreau

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society. Henry David Thoreau

What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? Henry David Thoreau

Which is the best man to deal with, -he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all? Henry David Thoreau

There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. Henry David Thoreau

To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exlcude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Henry David Thoreau

‎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 pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi. Henry David Thoreau