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The Thoreau Institute
at Walden Woods Library
Thoreau's
Life & Writings
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Henry D. Thoreau Quotation Pages
On Nature
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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. ["Walking"]
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I have a
room all to myself; it is nature. [Journal 3 January 1853]
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Nature
will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye
level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
She has no interstices; every part is full of life. ["Natural
History of Massachusetts"]
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Nature
would not appear so rich, the profusion so rich, if we knew a use
for everything. [Journal 11 August 1853]
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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. ["Natural History
of Massachusetts"]
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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. [Walden]
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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.
["Walking"]
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How
important is a constant intercourse with nature and the
contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of
moral and intellectual health! [Journal 6 May 1851]
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I love
Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him.
None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different
kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire
gladness. if this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I
should lose al hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He
makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this. [Journal
3 January 1853]
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Nature
has left nothing to the mercy of man. [Journal 22 March 1861]
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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. ["A
Walk to Wachusett"]
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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. [Journal
February 1851]
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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. ["Walking"]
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Perhaps
I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever
untameable Nature, or whatever else men call it, while coming
down this part of the mountain. We were passing over "Burnt Lands,"
burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed no recent marks of
fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but looked rather like a
natural pasture for the moose and deer, exceedingly wild and
desolate, with occasional strips of timber crossing them, and low
poplars springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there. I
found myself traversing them familiarly, like some pasture run to
waste, or partially reclaimed by man; but when I reflected what man,
what brother or sister or kinsman of our race made it and claimed
it, I expected the proprietor to rise up and dispute my passage. It
is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We
habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we
have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast, and
drear, and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here
something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at
the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the
form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of
which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no
man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor
pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor
waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet
Earth, as it was made forever and ever,—to be the dwelling of man,
we say,—so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not
to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,—not his
Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be
buried in,—no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie
there—the home this of Necessity and Fate. There was there felt the
presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for
heathenism and superstitious rites,—to be inhabited by men nearer of
kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. We walked over it with
a certain awe, stopping from time to time to pick the blueberries
which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste. Perchance where
our wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor in
Concord, there were once reapers, and husbandmen planted grain; but
here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a
specimen of what God saw fit to make this world. What is it to be
admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared
with being shown some star's surface, some hard matter in its home!
I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has
become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am
one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet
them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of
mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to
come in contact with it, —rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the
solid earth! the actual world! the common sense!
Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are
we? ["Ktaadn" The Maine Woods]
A
Note on the Text:
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Source:
Unless otherwise noted, quotations are from The Writings of Henry
David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906)
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