Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Opinions

• Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Music, Men, Piano

  Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.97, Courier Corporation

• How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved? If you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing that you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated again.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Knowing, Dollars

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.79, Penguin

• Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Confidence, Tyrants, Anxiety

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Walden”, p.8, Xist Publishing

• Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, "This is and no mistake.

  Henry David Thoreau

  New York, Philosophy, Mistake

• Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Soulmate, Literature, Innocence

  Henry David Thoreau (1995). “Walden, Or, Life in the Woods”, p.203, Courier Corporation

• See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Fate, Men, Thinking

  Henry David Thoreau (2004). “Walden: 150th Anniversary Illustrated Edition of the American Classic”, p.5, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• As for Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Novelty, Opinion

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.23, Graphic Arts Books

• The Iliad represents no creed nor opinion, and we read it with a rare sense of freedom and irresponsibility, as if we trod on native ground, and were autochthones of the soil.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Religion, Soil, Opinion

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.294, Courier Corporation

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