Henry David Thoreau Quotations: Living Life
They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself.—WaldenÂ
This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort, or boneset, to my intellect. This is what I go out to seek.—Journal, 7 January 1857
To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?—Walden
To set about living a true life is to go on a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men; and as long as the old are around me, I know that I am not in any true sense living a new or a better life. The outward is only the outside of that which is within.—Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 27 March 1848
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
Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away,—passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man’s capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to!—Journal, 19 April 1856
We live but a fraction of our life.—Journal, 13 June 1851
When I hear music, I flutter, and am the scene of life, as a fleet of merchantmen when the wind rises.—Journal, 24 April 1841
When it was proposed to me to go abroad, rub oft some rust, and better my condition in a worldly sense, I fear lest my life will lose some of its homeliness. If these fields and streams and woods, the phenomena of nature here, and the simple occupations of the inhabitants should cease to interest and inspire me, no culture or wealth would atone for the loss.—Journal, 11 March 1856
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.—Walden
