Henry David Thoreau Quotations: RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY
Only in their saner moments do men hear the crickets. It is balm to the philosopher. It tempers his thoughts.—Journal, 22 May 1854
Our mother's faith has not grown with her experience. Her experience has been too much for her. The lesson of life was too hard for her to learn.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Poetry implies the whole truth. Philosophy expresses a particle of it.—Journal, 26 January 1852
Poets and philosophers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men.—"Wild Apples"
Slow are the beginnings of philosophy.—"Natural History of Massachusetts"
Some of these sublime sentences, as the Chaldaean oracles of Zoroaster, still surviving after a thousand revolutions and translations, alone make us doubt if the poetic form and dress are not transitory, and not essential to the most effective and enduring expression of thought.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Thank God, no Hindoo tyranny prevailed at the framing of the world, but we are freemen of the universe, and not sentenced to any cast.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversÂ
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
That nation is not Christian where the principles of humanity so not prevail, but the prejudices of race.—Journal, 25 September 1851
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
