Henry David Thoreau Wisdom Quotations

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

It is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts; but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates.

One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.

With wisdom we shall learn liberality.

From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality.

Is there any such thing as wisdom not applied to life?

After reading Howitt's account of the Australian gold-diggings one evening,... I asked myself why I might not be washing some golddaily, though it were only the finest particles,--why I might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine.... At any rate, I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence.

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man.

Concord is just as idiotic as ever in relation to the spirits and their knockings. Most people here believe in a spiritual world ... in spirits which the very bullfrogs in our meadows would blackball. Their evil genius is seeing how low it can degrade them. The hooting of owls, the croaking of frogs, is celestial wisdom in comparison.

I should consider it a greater success to interest one wise and earnest soul, than a million unwise and frivolous.

I do not remember anything which Confucius has said directly respecting man's "origin, purpose, and destiny." He was more practical than that. He is full of wisdom applied to human relations,--to the private life,--the family,--government, etc. It is remarkable that, according to his own account, the sum and substance of his teaching is, as you know, to do as you would be done by.

Webster never goes behind government, and so cannot speak with authority about it. His words are wisdom to those legislators who contemplate no essential reform in the existing government; but for thinkers, and those who legislate for all time, he never once glances at the subject.... Comparatively, he is always strong, original, and, above all, practical. Still, his quality is not wisdom, but prudence.

Men do not fail commonly for want of knowledge, but for want of prudence to give wisdom the preference.

The life of a wise man is most of all extemporaneous, for he lives out of an eternity which includes all time.

Ex oriente lux may still be the motto of scholars, for the Western world has not yet derived from the East all the light which itis destined to receive thence.

To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense,it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it.

What we need to know in any case is very simple.

Unless we do more than simply learn the trade of our time, we are but apprentices, and not yet masters of the art of life.

On every hand we observe a truly wise practice, in education, in morals, and in the arts of life, the embodied wisdom of many an ancient philosopher.

What is commonly honored with the name of Friendship is no very profound or powerful instinct. Men do not, after all, love their Friends greatly. I do not often see the farmers made seers and wise to the verge of insanity by their Friendship for one another. They are not often transfigured and translated by love in each other's presence. I do not observe them purified, refined, and elevated by the love of a man.

The wise are not so much wiser than others as respecters of their own wisdom.

English sense has toiled, but Hindoo wisdom never perspired.

It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left.

Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost.

Not by constraint or severity shall you have access to true wisdom, but by abandonment, and childlike mirth-fulness. If you would know aught, be gay before it.

If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

How earthy old people become -moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.

A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance.

The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful.

A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again And what do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique.