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Henry David Thoreau Quotes - Page 105

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A traveler who looks at things with an impartial eye may see what the oldest inhabitant has not observed.

A traveler who looks at things with an impartial eye may see what the oldest inhabitant has not observed.

Henry David Thoreau
Travel, Home, Eye
Henry David Thoreau (1999). “Material Faith: Thoreau on Science”, p.27, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Give me the old familiar walk, postoffice and all, with this ever new self, with this infinite expectation and faith, which does not know when it is beaten. We'll go nutting once more. We'll pluck the nut of the world, and crack it in the winter evenings. Theaters and all other sightseeing are puppet-shows in comparison. I will take another walk to the Cliff, another row on the river, another skate on the meadow, be out in the first snow, and associate with the winter birds. Here I am at home. In the bare and bleached crust of the earth I recognize my friend.

Henry David Thoreau
Travel, Home, Winter

The discoveries which we make abroad are special and particular; those which we make at home are general and significant. The further off, the nearer the surface. The nearer home, the deeper.

Henry David Thoreau
Travel, Home, Discovery
Henry David Thoreau (1993). “A Year in Thoreau's Journal: 1851”, p.205, Penguin

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead.

Henry David Thoreau
Travel, Horse, Home
Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Essays of Henry David Thoreau - Walking”, p.10, Editora Dracaena

This is a common experience in my traveling. I plod along, thinking what a miserable world this is and what miserable fellows we that inhabit it, wondering what it is tempts men to live in it; but anon I leave the towns behind and am lost in some boundless heath, and life becomes gradually more tolerable, if not even glorious.

Henry David Thoreau
Travel, Home, Men
Henry David Thoreau (1962). “Journal”

It is far more independent to travel on foot. You have to sacrifice so much to the horse. You cannot choose the most agreeable places in which to spend the noon., commanding the finest views, because commonly there is no water there, or you cannot get there with your horse.

Henry David Thoreau
Travel, Horse, Home
Henry David Thoreau (1999). “Elevating Ourselves: Thoreau on Mountains”, p.8, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

It takes a man of genius to travel in his own country, in his native village; to make any progress between his door and his gate.

Henry David Thoreau
Country, Travel, Home
Henry David Thoreau, Jeffrey S. Cramer (2007). “I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau”, p.86, Yale University Press

When you are starting away, leaving your more familiar fields, for a little adventure like a walk, you look at every object with a traveler's, or at least with historical, eyes; you pause on the first bridge, where an ordinary walk hardly commences, and begin to observe and moralize like a traveler. It is worth the while to see your native village thus sometimes, as if you were a traveler passing through it, commenting on your neighbors as strangers.

Henry David Thoreau
Travel, Eye, Home
Henry David Thoreau (1962). “The journal of Henry D. Thoreau”

There would be this advantage in traveling in your own country, even in your own neighborhood, that you would be so thoroughly prepared to understand what you saw you would make fewer traveler's mistakes.

Henry David Thoreau
Country, Travel, Mistake

If a man is rich and strong anywhere, it must be on his native soil. Here I have been these forty years learning the language of these fields that I may the better express myself. If I should travel to the prairies, I should much less understand them, and my past life would serve me but ill to describe them. Many a weed here stands for more of life to me than the big trees of California would if I should go there. We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.

Henry David Thoreau
Weed, Travel, Strong
Henry David Thoreau, Jeffrey S. Cramer (2007). “I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau”, p.346, Yale University Press

When it was proposed to me to go abroad, rub oft some rust, and better my condition in a worldly sense, I fear lest my life will lose some of its homeliness. If these fields and streams and woods, the phenomena of nature here, and the simple occupations of the inhabitants should cease to interest and inspire me, no culture or wealth would atone for the loss.

Henry David Thoreau
Travel, Home, Loss

I want nothing new, if I can have but a tithe of the old secured to me. I will spurn all wealth beside. Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from here! When the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and nearer here!

Henry David Thoreau
Travel, Home, Thinking
Henry David Thoreau (1963). “Thoreau: people, principles, and politics”

Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, - passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man's capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to!

Henry David Thoreau
Music, Night, Men
Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.159, Courier Corporation

The music of all creatures has to do with their loves, even of toads and frogs. Is it not the same with man?

Henry David Thoreau
Music, Men, Toads
Henry David Thoreau, Abigail Rorer (2010). “Of Woodland Pools, Spring-holes & Ditches: Excerpts from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau Wherein He Observes and Reflects Upon the Nature of Life and Vernal Pools”, p.60, Counterpoint Press

A thrumming of piano-strings beyond the gardens and through the elms. At length the melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me. By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree. This is no longer the dull earth on which I stood.

Henry David Thoreau
Music, Moving, Garden
Henry David Thoreau (1960). “H. D. Thoreau, a Writer's Journal”, p.91, Courier Corporation

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

Henry David Thoreau
Nature, Men, Wish
Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Essays of Henry David Thoreau - Walking”, p.2, Editora Dracaena

Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. I read in Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground, of the magnolia, and the Florida keys, and their warm sea breezes; of the fence-rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the rice-bird; of the breaking up of winter in Labrador, and the melting of the snow on the forks of the Missouri; and owe an accession of health to these reminiscences of luxuriant nature.

Henry David Thoreau
Nature, Reading, Book
Henry David Thoreau (2017). “Civil Disobedience & Other Essays - Premium Collection: 26 Political, Philosophical & Historical Essays: Slavery in Massachusetts, Life Without Principle, The Landlord, Walking, Sir Walter Raleigh, Paradise (to be) Regained, Herald of Freedom, A Plea for Captain John Brown, The Highland Light, Dark Ages…”, p.79, e-artnow

I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp, - tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it.

Henry David Thoreau
Running, Nature, Blood
Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.187, Graphic Arts Books

I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, 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.

Henry David Thoreau
Nature, Names, America
Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Excursions, and Poems - The Writings of Henry David Thoreau”, p.132, Read Books Ltd

Left to herself, nature is always more or less civilized, and delights in a certain refinement; but where the axe has encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had concealed with green banks of verdure, are exposed to sight.

Henry David Thoreau
Nature, Sight, Forests
Henry David Thoreau (2011). “The Natural History Essays”, p.39, Gibbs Smith

I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.

Henry David Thoreau
Nature, Literature, Adequate
Henry David Thoreau (1960). “H. D. Thoreau, a Writer's Journal”, p.25, Courier Corporation

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world, into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the cause-way to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.

Henry David Thoreau
Nature, Moon, Fire

Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe.

Henry David Thoreau
Looks, Said, Observation
Henry David Thoreau, Steve Grant (2005). “Daily Observations: Thoreau on the Days of the Year”, p.68, Univ of Massachusetts Press

Spring. March fans it, April christens it, and May puts on its jacket and trousers.

Henry David Thoreau
Spring, Fans, May
Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.1949, Delphi Classics

The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever!

Henry David Thoreau
Spring, Years, Sparrows
Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.180, Simon and Schuster

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