Sharpen Your Blade

 

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Quotes by Henry David Thoreau:

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.  Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,--"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government.

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house.  I had gone down to the woods for other purposes.  But wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.  It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party.

The fate of the country . . . does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.

Anyone in a free society where the laws are unjust has an obligation to break the law.

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.  They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc.  In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well.  Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.  They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs.  Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.

Every ambitious would-be empire, clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and it is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie; and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

I was not born to be forced.  I will breathe after my own fashion.  Let us see who is the strongest.  What force has a multitude?  They only can force me who obey a higher law than I.  They force me to become like themselves.  I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men.  What sort of life were that to live?  When I meet a government which says to me, "Your money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my money?

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone. . . . I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave.

The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.

If I knew that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.  Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that practically I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all.

I saw that the state was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman . . . and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all remaining respect for it . . . .

Men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison . . . the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.

Why does it [government] not cherish its wise minority?  Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt?  Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them?  Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth, - certainly the machine will wear out.  If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.  Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

The government of itself never furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of the way.

A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.  There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one Man?

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

We do not live our life out and full; we do not fill all our pores with our blood; we do not inspire and expire fully and entirely enough, so that the wave, the comber, of each inspiration shall break upon our extremest shores, rolling till it meets the sand which bounds us, and the sound of the surf come back to us.  Might not a bellows assist us to breathe?  That our breathing should create a wind in a calm day!  We live but a fraction of our life.  Why do we not let on the flood, raise the gates, and set all our wheels in motion?  He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  I did not wish to live what was not life....I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

Fire is the most tolerable third party.

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages.  But many are no more worthily employed now.

Through want of enterprise and faith, men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.

It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

Be not simply good; be good for something.

I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well.  There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails.

Every path but your own is the path of fate.  Keep on your own track, then.

Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.  I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been.  They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.

Our life is frittered away by detail . . . . Simplify, simplify.

A man is rich in proportion of the number of things he can afford to let alone.

I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus,--those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men....They lived not in vain.

It is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

At first blush, a man is not capable of reporting the truth; he must be drenched and saturated with it first.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things . . . . Read not the Times, read the Eternities.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.  We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.  What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather, indicates, his fate.

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow unless he sweats easier than I do.

I had three chairs in my house:  one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

The swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.

As for doing good, that is one of the professions which are full.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe . . . till we come to a hard bottom of rocks in place, which we can call reality.

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

Every man is the builder of a temple called his body.

He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right.  

Man is the artificer of his own happiness.

To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.