"I would not have every man nor..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau
I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.
More by Henry David Thoreau
“I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.”
“We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.”
“I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.”
More on Individuality
“Everyone must become their own person, however frightful that may be.”
“The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)”
“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
More on Nature
“Having reached the term of his natural life"; Mwould it not be truer to say, Having reached the term of his unnatural life?”
“When we are in health, all sounds fife and drum for us; we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn.”
“Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.”