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Quotes from Life Without Principle — Henry David Thoreau

1817–1862 United States

← All quotes by Henry David Thoreau

39 quotes

It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.

Life Without Principle (1863)

You come from attending the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural phenomenon. A little thought is sexton to all the world.

Life Without Principle (1863)

Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

Life Without Principle (1863)

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.

Life Without Principle (1863)

An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not.

Life Without Principle (1863)

I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society.

Life Without Principle (1863)

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Life Without Principle (1863)

You must get your living by loving.

Life Without Principle (1863)

The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity, when contrasted with a finer intelligence.

Life Without Principle (1863)

They are infra-human, a kind of vegetation.

Life Without Principle (1863)

What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that, practically, I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all.

Life Without Principle (1863)

I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.

Life Without Principle (1863)

To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse.

Life Without Principle (1863)

It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men.

Life Without Principle (1863)

Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.

Life Without Principle (1863)

I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Life Without Principle (1863)

Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice?

Life Without Principle (1863)

We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.

Life Without Principle (1863)

When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct.

Life Without Principle (1863)

The title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied. How can one be a wise man, if he does not know any better how to live than other men? — if he is only more cunning and intellectually subtle?

Life Without Principle (1863)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Henry David Thoreau (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.