What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

— Henry David Thoreau

What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter.

— Henry David Thoreau

What sort of philosophers is we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?

— Henry David Thoreau

When a dog runs at your whistle for him.

— Henry David Thoreau

When I consider that the nobler animal have been exterminated here - the cougar, the panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, dear, the beaver, the turkey and so forth and so forth, I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country... Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature I am conversing with? As if I were to study a tribe of Indians that had lost all its warriors... I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. Furthermore, I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.

— Henry David Thoreau

When I hear music I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. Furthermore, I am related to the earliest times and to the latest.

— Henry David Thoreau

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. Furthermore, I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

— Henry David Thoreau

When I would recreate myself I seek the darkest wood the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place - a sanctum sanatorium. There is the strength the marrow of Nature.

— Henry David Thoreau

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

— Henry David Thoreau

Where there is a brave man in the thickest of the fight there is the post of honor.

— Henry David Thoreau