"In a world of peace and love, music would be the universal language."
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Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 16 of 139)
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"Each new year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again, it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. How happens it that the associations it awakens are always pleasing, never saddening, reminiscences of our sanest hours. The voice of nature is always encouraging."
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"Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them."
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"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."
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"I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society."
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"Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring."
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"Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure."
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"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains."
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"Decay and disease are often beautiful, like the pearly tear of the shellfish and the hectic glow of consumption."
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"Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone."
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"It often happens that a man develops a deeper love and friendship with his pet cat or dog than he does with most of the other humans in his life."
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"I should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity; for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own."
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"Such is beauty ever,-neither here nor there, now nor then,-neither in Rome nor in Athens, but wherever there is a soul to admire."
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"The most alive is the wildest."
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"We need the tonic of the wilderness, to wade sometimes in the marsh where the bitten and the meadow hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground."
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"We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected."
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"It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious."
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"Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other. Not only individuals but states have thus a confirmed dyspepsia."
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"We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor."
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"I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark."
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