Henry David Thoreau Quotations: LIFE
These earthly sounds should only die away for a season, as the strains of the harp rise and swell. Death is that expressive pause in the music of the blast.—Journal, 29 December 1841
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 is a common experience in my traveling. I plod along, thinking what a miserable world this is and what miserable fellows we that inhabit it, wondering what it is tempts men to live in it; but anon I leave the towns behind and am lost in some boundless heath, and life becomes gradually more tolerable, if not even glorious.—Journal, 17 June 1857
This life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction.—Thoreau to Daniel Ricketson, 4 November 1860
This life we live is a strange dream, and I don't believe at all any account men give of it.—Thoreau to Mrs. Cynthia (Dunbar) Thoreau, 6 August 1843
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
Till we have loved we have not imagined the heights of love.—Journal, 28 September 1843
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 die is not to begin to die, and continue; it is not a state of continuance, but of transientness; but to live is a condition of continuance, and does not mean to be born merely. There is no continuance of death.—Journal, 12 March 1842
To one we love we are related as to nature in the spring. Our dreams are mutually intelligible. We take the census, and find that there is one.—Journal, 30 April 1851
