Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Farming

• I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Eye, Men, House

  Henry David Thoreau, Nancy L. Rosenblum (1996). “Thoreau: Political Writings”, p.24, Cambridge University Press

• By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mean, Selfishness, Landscape

  Henry David Thoreau, Michael McCurdy, Terry Tempest Williams (2010). “Walden”, p.88, Shambhala Publications

• Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Interesting, Farming, Poor

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.121, Graphic Arts Books

• I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Fashion, Hate, Simple

  Henry David Thoreau (2011). “The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861”, p.342, New York Review of Books

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