Quotes & Sayings About Love Thoreau

I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good. — Henry David Thoreau

For a companion, I require one who will make an equal demand on me with my own genius. Such a one will always be rightly tolerant.It is suicide, and corrupts good manners, to welcome any less than this. I value and trust those who love and praise my aspiration rather than my performance. If you would not stop to look at me, but look whither I am looking, and farther, then my education could not dispense with your company. — Henry David Thoreau

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. — Henry David Thoreau

I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither. — Henry David Thoreau

I love my friends very much, but I find that it is of no use to go to see them. I hate them commonly when I am near them. They belie themselves and deny me continually. — Henry David Thoreau

I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly. — Henry David Thoreau

Any life he'd ever heard of, his own included, was burdened with emotions - love, loss, jobs, jealousy, money, death, pain. But if you were Jewish, always there was this extra one, the added pull at your endurance, the one more thing. There was that line in Thoreau about 'quiet desperation' - that was indeed true of most men. But for some men and women, for some fathers and mothers and children, the world still contrived that one extra test, endless and unrelenting. — Laura Z. Hobson

In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) "the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it." We'd love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place. — Rolf Potts

As I wandered around the room, with Sachiko by my side, I began to think how much we need space in those we love, space enough to accommodate growth and possibility. Knowledge must leave room for mystery; intimacy, taken too far, was the death of imagination. Keeping some little distance from her was, I thought, a way of keeping an open space, a silence for the imagination to fill.
"At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things," Thoreau had written, "we require that all things be mysterious and unexplainable. — Pico Iyer

One may be drunk with love without being any nearer to finding his mate ... Love must be as much a light as a flame. — Henry David Thoreau

We love to hear some men speak, though we hear not what they say; the very air they breathe is rich and perfumed, and the sound of their voices falls on the ear like the rustling of leaves or the crackling of the fire. They stand many deep. — Henry David Thoreau

You have but little more to do than throw up your cap for entertainment these American days ... Farmers' sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from his throat, though he tells them it is all deception. Surely, men love darkness rather than light. — Henry David Thoreau

Between whom there is hearty truth there is love ... — Henry David Thoreau

However mean your life is, meet and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its doors as early in the spring. Cultivate property like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts ... Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul. — Henry David Thoreau

As I love nature, as I love singing birds ... I love thee, my friend. — Henry David Thoreau

As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for it. As for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to ... For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them
who were above such trifling. — Henry David Thoreau

I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus. — Henry David Thoreau

If it is the result of a pure love, there can be nothing sensual in marriage. Chastity is something positive, not negative. It isthe virtue of the married especially. All lusts or base pleasures must give place to loftier delights. They who meet as superior beings cannot perform the deeds of inferior ones. — Henry David Thoreau

Love is no individual's experience; and though we are imperfect mediums, it does not partake of our imperfection; though we are finite, it is infinite and eternal ... — Henry David Thoreau

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. — Henry David Thoreau

Let no one think that I do not love the old ministers. They were, probably, the best men in their generation, and they deserve that their biographies should fill the pages of the town histories. If I could but hear the "glad tidings" of which they tell, and which, perchance, they heard, I might write in a worthier strain than this. — Henry David Thoreau

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. — Henry David Thoreau

Good religious men, with the love of men in their hearts, and the means to pay their toll in their pockets. — Henry David Thoreau

But, commonly, men are as much afraid of love as of hate. — Henry David Thoreau

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. — Henry David Thoreau

It often happens that a man develops a deeper love and friendship with his pet cat or dog than he does with most of the other humans in his life. — Henry David Thoreau

Love is the profoundest of secrets. Divulged, even to the beloved, it is no longer Love. As if it were merely I that loved you. When love ceases, then it is divulged. — Henry David Thoreau

Love must be as much a light as it is a flame. — Henry David Thoreau

I love you not as something private and personal, which is my own, but as something universal and worthy of love which I have found. — Henry David Thoreau

A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service. — Henry David Thoreau

A true Friendship is as wise as it is tender. The parties to it yield implicitly to the guidance of their love, and know no otherlaw nor kindness. — Henry David Thoreau

All nations love the same jests and tales, Jews, Christians, and Mahometans, and the same translated suffice for all. — Henry David Thoreau

Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. — Henry David Thoreau

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. I love a broad margin to my life. — Henry David Thoreau

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without. — Henry David Thoreau

Some have asked if the stock of men could not be improved,
if they could not be bred as cattle. Let Love be purified, and all therest will follow. A pure love is thus, indeed, the panacea for all the ills of the world. — Henry David Thoreau

The only way to tell the truth is to speak with kindness. Only the words of a loving man can be heard — Henry David Thoreau

I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this. — Henry David Thoreau

As for the complex ways of living, I love them not, however much I practice them. In as many places as possible, I will get my feet down to the earth. — Henry David Thoreau

He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair. — Henry David Thoreau

For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman; ... but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do. — Henry David Thoreau

The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like
the azure ether beyond. — Henry David Thoreau

There must be some nerve and heroism in our love, as of a winter morning. — Henry David Thoreau

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. — Henry David Thoreau

I love a broad margin to my life. — Henry David Thoreau

I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise til noon, rapt in a revery. — Henry David Thoreau

I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too. — Henry David Thoreau

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. — Henry David Thoreau

It is strange to talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains. — Henry David Thoreau

A man may acquire a taste for wine or brandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him. — Henry David Thoreau

May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love! — Henry David Thoreau

Enemies publish themselves. They declare war. The friend never declares his love. — Henry David Thoreau

Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him. — Henry David Thoreau

A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep. — Henry David Thoreau

In love and friendship the imagination is as much exercised as the heart; and if either is outraged the other will be estranged. It is commonly the imagination which is wounded first, rather than the heart,
it is so much the more sensitive. — Henry David Thoreau

I value and trust those w^ho love and praise my aspiration rather than my performance. — Henry David Thoreau

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust. — Henry David Thoreau

Some are "industrious," and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to suchI have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do,
work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers. — Henry David Thoreau

I'm going to paraphrase Thoreau here ... rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness ... give me truth. — Jon Krakauer

The English did not come to America from a mere love of adventure, nor to truck with or convert the savages, nor to hold offices under the crown, as the French to a great extent did, but to live in earnest and with freedom. — Henry David Thoreau

What other words, we may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to be repeated than those which love has inspired? It is wonderful that they were ever uttered. They are few and rare indeed, but, like a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and modulated by the memory. All other words crumble off with the stucco which overlies the heart. We should not dare to repeat these now aloud. We are not competent to hear them at all times. — Henry David Thoreau

Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent. — Henry David Thoreau

The object of love expands and grows before us to eternity, until it includes all that is lovely, and we become all that can love. — Henry David Thoreau

A driving snow-storm in the night and still raging; five or six inches deep on a level at 7 A.M. All birds are turned into snowbirds. Trees and houses have put on the aspect of winter. The traveller's carriage wheels, the farmer's wagon, are converted into white disks of snow through which the spokes hardly appear. But it is good now to stay in the house and read and write. We do not now go wandering all abroad and dissipated, but the imprisoning storm condenses our thoughts. I can hear the clock tick as not in pleasant weather. My life is enriched. I love to hear the wind howl. I have a fancy for sitting with my book or paper in some mean and apparently unfavorable place, in the kitchen, for instance, where the work is going on, rather a little cold than comfortable. — Henry David Thoreau

I love the broad margin to my life. — Henry David Thoreau

We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,
at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives onthe sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird. — Henry David Thoreau

What I treasure most at any moment is intimacy, surprise, a sense of mystery, wit, depth and love. A handful of cherished friends offer me this, and the occasional singer or film-maker or artist. But my most reliable sources of electricity are Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville and Emily Dickinson. — Pico Iyer

I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest. I lie and relie on the earth. — Henry David Thoreau

We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood ... What a perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature. What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the poke! — Henry David Thoreau

I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me that, by the want of pecuniary wealth, I have been nailed dawn to this my native region so long and steadily, and made to study and love this spot of earth more and more. What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering? The traveler's is but a barren and comfortless condition. Wealth will not buy a man a home in nature-house nor farm there. The man of business does not by his business earn a residence in nature, but is denaturalized rather. — Henry David Thoreau

If to chaffer and higgle are bad in trade, they are much worse in Love. It demands directness as of an arrow. — Henry David Thoreau

What is commonly honored with the name of Friendship is no very profound or powerful instinct. Men do not, after all, love their Friends greatly. I do not often see the farmers made seers and wise to the verge of insanity by their Friendship for one another. They are not often transfigured and translated by love in each other's presence. I do not observe them purified, refined, and elevated by the love of a man. — Henry David Thoreau

After reading Howitt's account of the Australian gold-diggings one evening, ... I asked myself why I might not be washing some golddaily, though it were only the finest particles,
why I might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine ... At any rate, I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence. — Henry David Thoreau

A hero's love is as delicate as a maiden's. — Henry David Thoreau

Your religion is where your love is. — Henry David Thoreau

For if the truth were known, Love cannot speak, But only thinks and does; Though surely out 'twill leak Without the help of Greek, Or any tongue. — Henry David Thoreau

Hate can pardon more than love. — Henry David Thoreau

As Thoreau famously sead, it doesn't matter where or how far you go - the farther commonly the worse - the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love. — Pico Iyer

It has come to this, that the lover of art is one, and the lover of nature another, though true art is but the expression of our love of nature. — Henry David Thoreau

I need thy hate as much as thy love. — Henry David Thoreau

There is no treatment for adore, but to love far more. — Henry David Thoreau

There is no remedy for love but to love more. — Henry David Thoreau

The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so careful to secure them. — 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

You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake. You must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand-heap. You must have so good an appetite as this, else you will live in vain — Henry David Thoreau

What is the singing of birds, or any natural sound, compared with the voice of one we love. — Henry David Thoreau

Love does not analyze its object. — Henry David Thoreau

There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains its maxims. It has no temple nor even a solitary column ... However, out fates at least are social. Our courses do not diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the centre. Men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly foretell it. We are inclined to lay the chief stress on likeness and not on difference, and in foreign bodies we admit that there are many degrees of warmth below blood heat, but none of cold above it. — Henry David Thoreau

Whether he sleeps or wakes, whether he runs or walks, whether he uses a microscope or a telescope, or his naked eye, a man never discovers anything, never overtakes anything or leaves anything behind, but himself. Whatever he says or does he merely reports himself. If he is in love, he loves; if he is in heaven, he enjoys, if he is in hell, he suffers. It is his condition that determines his locality. — Henry David Thoreau

Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. What — Henry David Thoreau

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it. — Henry David Thoreau

The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but as I love literature and to some extent the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much. — Henry David Thoreau

We communicate like the burrows of foxes, in silence and darkness, under ground. We are undermined by faith and love. — Henry David Thoreau

The deeds of love are less questionable than any action of an individual can be, for, it being founded on the rarest mutual respect, the parties incessantly stimulate each other to a loftier and purer life, and the act in which they are associated must be pure and noble indeed, for innocence and purity can have no equal. In this relation we deal with one whom we respect more religiously even than we respect our better selves, and we shall necessarily conduct as in the presence of God. What presence can be more awful to the lover than the presence of his beloved? — Henry David Thoreau

I delight to come to my bearings, - not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may, - not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts me; - not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less, - not suppose a case, but take the case that is — Henry David Thoreau

As for clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. — Henry David Thoreau

The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church and the Sabbath-school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue. Yet I early escaped from their meshes. It is hard to get the commentaries out of one's head and taste its true flavor ... It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians. In fact, I love this book rarely, though it is a sort of castle in the air to me, which I am permitted to dream. — Henry David Thoreau

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence. — Henry David Thoreau

I have no designs on society, or nature, or God. I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that. I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future. I love to live. — Henry David Thoreau

The only remedy for love is to love more. — Henry David Thoreau