Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Fathers

• If Nature is our mother, then God is our father.

  Henry David Thoreau

  God, Mother, Nature

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.265, Xist Publishing

• I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Father, Thinking, Years

  Henry David Thoreau (2006). “Thoreau and the Art of Life: Precepts and Principles”, p.19, Heron Dance Press

• Nature herself has not provided the most graceful end for her creatures. What becomes of all these birds that people the air and forest for our solacement? The sparrow seems always chipper, never infirm. We do not see their bodies lie about. Yet there is a tragedy at the end of each one of their lives. They must perish miserably; not one of them is translated. True, "not a sparrow falleth to the ground without our Heavenly Father's knowledge," but they do fall, nevertheless.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Father, Lying, Fall

  Henry David Thoreau (1873). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.236

• Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Father, Men, Bravery

  Henry David Thoreau (1882). “Walden”, p.255

• Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return-prepared to send beck our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, brother and sister, and wife and child and friends and never see them again,-if you have paid your debts and made your will, and settled your affairs and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Brother, Children

• When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Father, Writing

  Henry David Thoreau (2006). “Thoreau and the Art of Life: Precepts and Principles”, p.13, Heron Dance Press

• The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Father, Men, Race

  Henry David Thoreau (1995). “Walden, Or, Life in the Woods”, p.9, Courier Corporation

• Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Education, Running, Father

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Walden”, p.38, Xist Publishing

• No people ever lived by cursing their fathers, however great a curse their fathers might have been to them.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Father, People, Might

  Henry David Thoreau (2008). “Cape Cod: Illustrated Edition of the American Classic”, p.19, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• There they lived on, those New England people, farmer lives, father and grandfather and great-grandfather, on and on without noise, keeping up tradition, and expecting, beside fair weather and abundant harvests, we did not learn what. They were contented to live, since it was so contrived for them, and where their lines had fallen.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Father, Weather

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.166, Delphi Classics

• The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Spiritual, Uncles

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.194, Penguin

• 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

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