Henry David Thoreau Quotes About House

• What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Love, Inspiring, Peace

  Henry David Thoreau, Joseph O. Valentine, Thoreau Society (2001). “Thoreau on Land: Nature's Canvas”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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 poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house 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

  Cheer, Spring, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Walden”, p.232, Xist Publishing

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

  Henry David Thoreau

  Friendship, Home, Two

  Walden ch. 6 (1854)

• The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Reflection, Men, House

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Walden”, p.232, Xist Publishing

• 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

  Travel, Kindness, Home

• While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Kings, Men, Civilization

  Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Walden”, p.21, Cosimo, Inc.

• Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison, the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. They do not know how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Giving Up, War, Men

• And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, - we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Running, Dog, Memorable

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Walden”, p.68, Xist Publishing

• I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Good Morning, Reality, House

  "Walden, Or, Life in the Woods".

• 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

• Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Cutting, Men, House

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Walking: Top Essays”, p.3, 谷月社

• Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.

  Henry David Thoreau

  House, Literature, Property Ownership

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Walden”, p.26, Xist Publishing

• We saw one school-house in our walk, and listened to the sounds which issued from it; but it appeared like a place where the process, not of enlightening, but of obfuscating the mind was going on, and the pupils received only so much light as could penetrate the shadow of the Catholic church.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Education, School, Light

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Yankee in Canada”, p.35, Graphic Arts Books

• Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always. Every house is, in this sense, a hospital.

  Henry David Thoreau

  House, Insanity, Staying

  Henry David Thoreau, Jeffrey S. Cramer (2007). “I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau”, p.299, Yale University Press

• Four things to think about. 1. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. 2. Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred. 3. Keep three chairs in your house. One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. 4. To preserve your relationship to nature, make your life more moral, more pure, more innocent.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Nature, Thinking

• The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, would be good for me, too.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Rain, Land

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Walden”, p.95, Xist Publishing

• When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, [I] submit myself to my instinct to decide for me.

  Henry David Thoreau

  House, Steps, Instinct

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.398, Penguin

• What is sour in the house a bracing walk in the woods makes sweet.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Sweet, House, Woods

• The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state....The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Baby, Block, School

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

  Henry David Thoreau

  Funny, Life, Running

  Henry David Thoreau (1995). “Walden, Or, Life in the Woods”, p.48, Courier Corporation

• I was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Independent, Agriculture, House

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.42, Graphic Arts Books

• I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Lonely, Horse, Stars

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.84, Simon and Schuster

• Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it...At last we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Horse, Children, Thinking

• I lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital part of the house.

  Henry David Thoreau

  House, Fireplaces

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.142, Simon and Schuster

• At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house.

  Henry David Thoreau

  House, Site, Spots

  Henry David Thoreau (1882). “Walden”, p.128

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