"I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves."
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Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 107 of 139)
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"Even Nature is observed to have her playful moods or aspects, of which man sometimes seems to be the sport."
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"For my own part, I commonly attend more to nature than to man, but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent."
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"How meanly and grossly do we deal with nature!"
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"How little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. They insult nature. Every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws."
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"In society you will not find health, but in nature. Unless our feet at least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would bepale and livid. Society is always diseased, and the best is the most so."
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"Nature is mythical and mystical always, and works with the license and extravagance of genius. She has her luxurious and florid style as well as art."
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"Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever."
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"Nature is goodness crystallized."
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"The chickadee and nuthatch are more inspiring society than statesmen and philosophers, and we shall return to these last as to more vulgar companions."
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"Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes."
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"We could not help contrasting the equanimity of Nature with the bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume alwaysa crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending."
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"But there are spirits of a yet more liberal culture, to whom no simplicity is barren. There are not only stately pines, but fragile flowers, like the orchises, commonly described as too delicate for cultivation, which derive their nutriment from the crudest mass of peat. These remind us, that, not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger's path and the Indian's trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness."
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"The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him."
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"The murmurs of many a famous river on the other side of the globe reach even to us here, as to more distant dwellers on its banks;many a poet's stream, floating the helms and shields of heroes on its bosom."
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"This is one of those instances in which the individual genius is found to consent, as indeed it always does, at last, with the universal."
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"He who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly."
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"He may travel who can subsist on the wild fruits and game of the most cultivated country."
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"I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is madeand at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me."
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"Continued traveling is far from productive. It begins with wearing away the soles of the shoes, and making the feet sore, and erelong it will wear a man clean up, after making his heart sore into the bargain. I have observed that the afterlife of those who have traveled much is very pathetic."
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