Henry David Thoreau House Quotations

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

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.

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

I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, will be fixture enough.

I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it for warmth as well as shelter.

The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.

It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another.

Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.

A temple, you know, was anciently "an open place without a roof," whose walls served merely to shut out the world and direct the mind toward heaven; but a modern meeting-house shuts out the heavens, while it crowds the world into still closer quarters.

Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.

The Indian...stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison.

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

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

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

It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain.

Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. ... Shall we always study to obtain more, and not sometimes be content with less?

I have learned that even the smallest house can be a home.

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

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

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.

When the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him... a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

The chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground, and rising through the house to the heavens; evenafter the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent.

East of my bean-field, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham, slave of Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentleman, of Concord village, whobuilt his slave a house, and gave him permission to live in Walden Woods;MCato, not Uticensis, but Concordiensis. Some say that he was a Guinea Negro. There are a few who remember his little patch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till he should be old and need them; but a younger and whiter speculator got them at last. He too, however, occupies an equally narrow house at present.

There is one thought for the field, another for the house. I would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted in the house.

In Canada an ordinary New England house would be mistaken for the château, and while every village here contains at least severalgentlemen or "squires," there is but one to a seigniory.

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?

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

It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have...but shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?