Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Bones

• Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Love, Passion, Hypocrisy

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.1727, Delphi Classics

• We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bone.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Blood, Flesh, Bones

  1854 Walden, or Life in the Woods,'Higher Laws'.

• Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Blood, Style

  1854 Walden, or Life in the Woods,'Higher Laws'.

• 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.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Philosophical, Animal, Oxen

• Why should we be startled by death? Life is a constant putting off of the mortal coil - coat, cuticle, flesh and bones, all old clothes.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Clothes, Coats, Flesh

  Henry David Thoreau, John C. Broderick, Robert Sattelmeyer (1981). “Journal”, p.211, Princeton University Press

• I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Blood, Flesh, Helping

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.83, Penguin

• When we consider the weak and nerveless periods of some literary men, who perchance in feet and inches come up to the standard oftheir race, and are not deficient in girth also, we are amazed at the immense sacrifice of thews and sinews. What! these proportions, these bones,--and this their work! Hands which could have felled an ox have hewed this fragile matter which would not have tasked a lady's fingers! Can this be a stalwart man's work, who has a marrow in his back and a tendon Achilles in his heel?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Women, Sacrifice, Feet

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.996, Delphi Classics

• Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veilhangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Heart, Past, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.109, Xist Publishing

• The man of genius, like a dog with a bone, or the slave who has swallowed a diamond, or a patient with the gravel, sits afar and retired, off the road, hangs out no sign of refreshment for man and beast, but says, by all possible hints and signs, I wish to be alone,--good-by,--fare-well. But the Landlord can afford to live without privacy.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Dog, Men, Solitude

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.1020, Delphi Classics

• The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Father, Rome

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Selected Essays of Henry David Thoreau”, p.170, Simon and Schuster

• There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,--all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Civilization, Heaven

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.39, Xist Publishing

• Poverty ... It is life near the bone, where it is sweetest.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Poverty, Bones

  Henry David Thoreau (2004). “Walden”, p.346, Collector's Library

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