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33b2fec
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The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?
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soil
seed
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Henry David Thoreau |
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e130a29
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They make their pride," he said, "in making their dinner cost much; I make my pride in making my dinner cost little." When asked at table what dish he preferred, he answered, "The nearest."
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Henry David Thoreau |
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afd3c56
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What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the hand a spreading leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, , on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip--
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Henry David Thoreau |
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9e391d3
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A single farm-house which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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add5c6c
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I walk out into a Nature such as the old prophets and poets, Manu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America: neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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988640c
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Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints. Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever. One would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable praise of God.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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247bdec
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it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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36af61b
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Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all--I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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dcdf0b2
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But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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bd5c393
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We might climb a tree, at least.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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71886eb
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It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another.
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small-house
simple-living
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Henry David Thoreau |
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a08b0fe
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I cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great measure vanish. Those conveniences which the student requires at Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides. Tho..
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Henry David Thoreau |
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e606145
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The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering from want of society. Was never a case like it. First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it was indigestion of the society I got.
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solitude
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Henry David Thoreau |
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7f39749
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Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them.
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money
charity
poor
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Henry David Thoreau |
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d8a37c8
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We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!
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Henry David Thoreau |
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d0963c4
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Girls and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the woods. They looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their time. Men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of the great distance at which I dwelt from something or other; and though they said that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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3a15a7b
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My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there but to transact some private business, with the fewest obstacles... It's a good place for business...
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Henry David Thoreau |
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db713e1
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English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. ... Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? ... I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. ... The West i..
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Henry David Thoreau |
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d363619
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Cosi i governi ci dimostrano quanto facilmente gli uomini possano essere ingannati e persino autoingannarsi nel proprio interesse.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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2bb8e00
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Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in tho..
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Henry David Thoreau |
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34ac8df
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I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes a-foot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles, the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wage. I remember when wages were sixty cents a-day for labourers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, ..
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Henry David Thoreau |
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7cfbccc
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The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but it is instinct.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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9505b73
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We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us!
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Henry David Thoreau |
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5174942
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To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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f5b7c1e
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The white man comes, pale as the dawn, with a load of thought, with a slumbering intelligence as a fire raked up, knowing well what he knows, not guessing but calculating; strong in community, yielding obedience to authority; of experienced race; of wonderful, wonderful common sense; dull but capable, slow but persevering, severe but just, of little humor but genuine; a laboring man, despising game and sport; building a house that endures, ..
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Henry David Thoreau |
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1b8393f
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Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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d609807
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Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows that surround it. We need the tonic of wildness...
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Henry David Thoreau |
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b73673d
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We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with Nature. He has glances of starry recognition to which our saloons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying li..
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Henry David Thoreau |
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a1ba970
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Thu luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another.
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class-struggle
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Henry David Thoreau |
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aa5d167
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No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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3e14e07
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Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still entirely unknown.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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6f44317
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There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains its maxims. It has no temple nor even a solitary column...However, out fates at least are social. Our courses do not diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the centre. Men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly foretell it. We are..
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humanity
friendship
love
kinship
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Henry David Thoreau |
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318dfeb
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Ich ging in die Walder, weil ich bewusst leben wollte.
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natur
leben
tod
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Henry David Thoreau |
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dd2f01d
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Any man will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and classbooks, and when we leave school, the Little Reading, and story books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, a..
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Henry David Thoreau |
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fab3765
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There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of 'expediency.' There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals, the only sliders are backsliders.
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politics
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Henry David Thoreau |
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e0071ff
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This man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have lived. Perchance he is not confounded by many knowledges, and has not sought out many inventions, but how to take many fishes before the sun sets, with slender birchen pole and flaxen line, that is invention enough for him.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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464e06d
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When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now..
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Henry David Thoreau |
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87099bb
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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 his last fruits also.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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aa2756c
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Morning brings back the heroic ages.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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9bbd844
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It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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349e490
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I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a m..
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Henry David Thoreau |
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dfd93de
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There is a low mist in the woods-- It is a good day to study lichens.
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nature
mycology
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Henry David Thoreau |
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e056ebe
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Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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6738572
|
If then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become of the worthies of the world.
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Henry David Thoreau |