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Henry David Thoreau Quotes about Summer

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Who could believe in the prophecies ... that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds.

Who could believe in the prophecies ... that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Believe, Science
Michael Benjamin Berger, Henry David Thoreau (2000). “Thoreau's Late Career and The Dispersion of Seeds: The Saunterer's Synoptic Vision”, p.126, Camden House

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality.

Henry David Thoreau
Life, Summer, Spring
Walden ch. 18 (1854). Frequently quoted as "marches to the tune of a different drummer."

. . . I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days. . . .

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Wealth, Rich
Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Walden”, p.125, Cosimo, Inc.

I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side,... to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Dream, Winter
Henry David Thoreau (1974). “The correspondence of Henry David Thoreau”, Greenwood Pub Group

In the summer we lay up a stock of experiences for the winter, as the squirrel of nuts?something for conversation in winter evenings.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Winter, Squirrels
Henry David Thoreau (2011). “The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861”, p.74, New York Review of Books

One must maintain a little bittle of summer, even in the middle of winter.

Henry David Thoreau
Inspirational, Summer, Nature

Live in each season as it passes: breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit.

Henry David Thoreau
Life, Summer, July
Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.119, Courier Corporation

Friendship is evanescent in every man's experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers.

Henry David Thoreau
Friendship, Summer, Past
Henry David Thoreau (1873). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.278

A worm is as good a traveler as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Travel, Evil
Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.217, Xist Publishing

Whenever I have read any part of the Vedas, I have felt that some unearthly and unknown light illuminated me. In the great teaching of the Vedas, there is no touch of sectarianism. It is of all ages, climbs, and nationalities and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge. When I read it, I feel that I am under the spangled heavens of a summer night.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Teaching, Night
"Explore Hinduism". Book by Bansi Pandit, p. 21, 2005.

In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and broke their tender limbs.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Flower, August
Henry David Thoreau (1882). “Walden”, p.179

I pray that the life of this spring and summer may ever lie fair in my memory.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Memories, Lying
Henry David Thoreau (2011). “The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861”, p.117, New York Review of Books

The indescribable innocence of and beneficence of Nature,-of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,-such health, such cheer, they afford forever!

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Nature, Cheer
Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.84, Simon and Schuster

I think of no news to tell you. It is a serene summer day here, all above the snow. The hens steal their nests, and I steal theireggs still, as formerly. This is what I do with the hands. Ah, labor,--it is a divine institution, and conversation with many men and hens.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Winter, Men
Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Familiar Letters - The Writings of Henry David Thoreau”, p.44, Read Books Ltd

To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine...So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Running, Morning

The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light and with a lamp lengthen out the day.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Moving, Mean
Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.152, Graphic Arts Books

The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature-of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter-such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Nature, Cheer
Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.84, Simon and Schuster

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by thehuman voice,--take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,--which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Night, Men
Henry David Thoreau (1992). “The Essays of Henry David Thoreau”, p.135, Rowman & Littlefield

Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Kings, Winter
Henry David Thoreau (2008). “Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Journal, Reviews and Posthumous Assessments, Criticism”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in. I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here are no lying nor vain epitaphs.

Henry David Thoreau
Death, Summer, Lying
"The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau: Selected and Edited by Lewis Hyde".

What a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of Ossian, and that of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare and Milton, much more of Dryden, and Pope, and Gray! Our summer of English poetry, like the Greek and Latin before it, seems well advanced towards its fall, and laden with the fruit and foliage of the season, with bright autumnal tints, but soon the winter will scatter its myriad clustering and shading leaves, and leave only a few desolate and fibrous boughs to sustain the snow and rime, and creak in the blasts of age.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Latin, Fall
Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.261, Xist Publishing

I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise til noon, rapt in a revery.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Morning, Taken
Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience: Top American Literary”, p.70, 谷月社

In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Sunset, Autumn

The fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter, and is about as ample at one season as at another. It is as well for cheerfulness as for warmth and dryness.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Winter, Fire
Henry David Thoreau (1873). “The Maine Woods”, p.38

Summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer, Autumn, Leafs
Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.252, Delphi Classics

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