Henry David Thoreau Quotations: LAND & WATER
I doubt if in the landscape there can be anything finer than a distant mountain-range. They are a constant elevating influence.—Journal, 17 May 1858
I enter a swamp as a sacred place—a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength—the marrow of Nature.—"Walking"
I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.—Walden
I have been surprised to discover the amount and the various kinds of life which a single shallow swamp will sustain.—Journal, 12 May 1850
I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant.—Walden
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.—Walden
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
I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest.—Journal, 16 November 1850
I love to see a clear crystalline water flowing out of a swamp over white sand and decayed wood, spring-like.—Journal, 18 July 1852
I love to wade and flounder through the swamp now, these bitter cold days when the snow lies deep on the ground, and I need travel but little way from the town to get to a Nova Zembla solitude,—to wade through the swamps, all snowed up, untracked by man, into which the fine dry snow is still drifting till it is even with the tops of the water andromeda and halfway up the high blueberry bushes.—Journal, 10 January 1856
