Henry David Thoreau Quotations: EDUCATION
Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Science is always brave, for to know, is to know good; doubt and danger quail before her eyes. What the coward overlooks in his hurry, she calmly scrutinizes, breaking ground like a pioneer for the array of arts that follow her train.—"Natural History of Massachusetts"
Science is inhuman. Things seen with a microscope begin to be insignificant.—Journal, 1 May 1859
Science never saw a ghost nor does it look for any but it sees everywhere the traces —and it is itself the agent—of a Universal Intelligence.—Journal, 2 December 1853
That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.—Walden
The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of them as we do.—Walden
The artist and his work are not to be separated.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or nature.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
The audience are never tired of hearing how far the wind carried some man, woman, or child, or family Bible, but they are immediately tired if you undertake to give them a scientific account of it.—Journal, 4 February 1852
The best way to correct a mistake is to make it right.—Thoreau to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 24 January 1843
