Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Labor
-
But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constantand imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.
→ -
This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work.
→ -
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?
→ -
The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.
→ -
If I choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler.
→ -
It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to their minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them off from their present pursuit.
→ -
To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.
→ -
I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.
→ -
It is so rare to meet with a man outdoors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands. Behind every man's busy-ness there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and industry, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it above the surface.
→ -
The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme,--a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection,--to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation,... and for these oversights successive generations have to pay.
→ -
Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their beans.
→ -
Though the hen should sit all day, she could lay only one egg, and, besides, would not have picked up materials for another.
→ -
Some are "industrious," and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to suchI have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do,--work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers.
→ -
The necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things to the scholar is rarely well remembered.
→ -
Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.
→ -
We perceive that the schemers return again and again to common sense and labor. Such is the evidence of history.
→ -
And if the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaininggross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former?
→ -
Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses; but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes.
→ -
Steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one's style, both of speaking and writing.
→ -
The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but last fruits also.
→ -
Those services which the community will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to render.
→ -
A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread.
→ -
The question is whether you can bear freedom. At present the vast majority of men, whether white or black, require the discipline of labor which enslaves them for their own good.
→ -
The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.
→ -
You must get your living by loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied.
→ -
As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. 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.
→ -
If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui.
→ -
There are many skillful apprentices, but few master workmen.
→ -
Surely the writer is to address a world of laborers, and such therefore must be his own discipline.
→ -
I have not earned what I have already enjoyed.
→
Related Authors
-
Mahatma Gandhi Civil rights leader -
Mark Twain Author -
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essayist -
John Muir Author -
Friedrich Nietzsche Philologist -
Louisa May Alcott Novelist -
Edgar Allan Poe Author -
Herman Melville Novelist -
Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil rights activist -
Christopher McCandless Adventurer -
Margaret Fuller Journalist -
Arthur Schopenhauer Philosopher -
Jean-Jacques Rousseau Philosopher -
Harriet Beecher Stowe Author -
Aldo Leopold Author -
Jack London Author -
Walt Whitman Poet -
Abraham Lincoln 16th U.S. President -
Leo Tolstoy Writer -
Nathaniel Hawthorne Novelist