Henry David Thoreau Experience Quotations

In the unbending of the arm to do the deed there is experience worth all the maxims in the world.

If within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil's angels.

It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.

It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever.

The experience of every past moment but belies the faith of each present.

We are superior to the joy we experience.

The intercourse of the sexes, I have dreamed, is incredibly beautiful, too fair to be remembered. I have had thoughts about it, but they are among the most fleeting and irrecoverable in my experience.

The necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things to the scholar is rarely well remembered.

The scholar is not apt to make his most familiar experience come gracefully to the aid of his expression.

The stars are distant and unobtrusive, but bright and enduring as our fairest and most memorable experiences.

One must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.

We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads,--and then we can hardly see anything else.

We can conceive of nothing more fair than something which we have experienced.

We are older by faith than by experience.

I think that no experience which I have today comes up to, or is comparable with, the experiences of my boyhood.

Surely one may as profitably be soaked in the juices of a swamp for one day as pick his way dry-shod over sand. Cold and damp ? are they not as rich experience as warmth and dryness?

The value of any experience is measured, of course, not by the amount of money, but the amount of development we get out of it.

Who is old enough to have learned from experience?

Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced.

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.