Henry David Thoreau Quotations: LAND & WATER
There is many a book which ripples on like a freshet, and flows as glibly as a mill-stream sucking under a causeway; and when their authors are in the full tide of their discourse, Pythagoras and Plato and Jamblichus halt beside them.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
These two are prevailing grasses at this season on dry and sandy fields and hillsides. The culms of both, not to mention their pretty flowers, reflect a purple tinge, and help declare the ripeness of the year.—"Autumnal Tints"
They appeared to lie by magic on the side of the vale, like a mirror left in a slanting position.—Cape Cod
Though the city is no more attractive to me than ever yet I see less difference between a city & and some dismallest swamp than formerly. It is a swamp too dismal & dreary even for me.—Journal, 29 July 1850
Thus a man shall lead his life away from here on the edge of the wilderness, in Indian Millinocket stream, in a new world, far in the dark of a continent, and have a flute to play at evening here, while his strains echo to the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live, as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man.—The Maine Woods
To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the feebler notes of other birds,—think of it!—Walden
Unpremeditated music is the true gauge which measures the current of our thoughts—the very undertow of our life's stream.—Journal, 18 August 1841
Waves of serener life pass over us from time to time, like flakes of sunlight over the fields in cloudy weather. In some happier moment, when more sap flows in the withered stalk of our life, Syria and India stretch away from our present as they do in history. All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
We are most apt to remember and cherish the flowers which appear earliest in the spring. I look with equal affection on those which are the latest to bloom in the fall.—Journal, 31 August 1850
We have the silver and the golden birch. This is like a fair, flaxen-haired sister of the dark-complexioned black birch, with golden ringlets. How lustily it takes hold of the swampy soil, and braces itself! And here flows a dark cherry-wood or wine-colored brook over the iron-red sands in the somber swamp,—swampy wine. In an undress, this tree. Ah, time will come when these will be all gone.—Journal, 4 January 1853
