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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 Wildness
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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 long for
wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where
the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning
ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever
unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me.
[Journal, 22 June 1853]
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As I came home
through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being
now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my
path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly
tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then,
except for that wildness which he represented. [Walden
"Higher Laws"]
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What we call
wildness is a civilization other than our own. [Journal, 16
February 1859]
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In Wildness is the
preservation of the World. ["Walking"]
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We need the tonic
of wildness —
to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen
lurk, and hearing 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 o the ground. [ Walden
"Spring"]
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It is in vain to dream of a
wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. [ Journal
30 August 1856]
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The most alive is the wildest.
["Walking"]
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Whatever has not come under the
sway of man is wild. In this sense original and independent men are
wild — not tamed
and broken by society. [Journal, 3 September 1851]
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Trench says a wild man is a willed
man. Well, then, a man of will who does what he wills or wishes, a
man of hope and of the future tense, for not only the obstinate is
willed, but far more the constant and persevering. The obstinate
man, properly speaking, is one who will not. The perseverance of the
saints is positive willedness, not a mere passive willingness. The
fates are wild, for they will; and the Almighty is wild above all,
as fate is. [Journal, 27 June 1853]
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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Report
errors to the
Curator of
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