Citations qui suscitent la réflexion par Henry David Thoreau

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait until the other is ready.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it.

The man is the artificer of his own happiness.

We are constantly invited to be what we are.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. what a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.

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.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

I can alter my life by altering my attitude. He who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers.