If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?
Author
Henry David Thoreau
203 quotations
About Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience", an argument in favor of citizen disobedience against an unjust state.
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Henry David ThoreauLive your life, do your work, then take your hat.
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.
All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
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It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
What is human warfare but just this an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.
The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.
No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.
It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.
I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.
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 …
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
Men have become the tools of their tools.
It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.