Henry David Thoreau Quotations: LIFE
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
To the healthy man the winter of his discontent never comes.—Journal, 13 October 1851
To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. Who chains me to this dull town?—"Resistance to Civil Government"
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
Virtue is the deed of the bravest art which demands the greatest confidence and fearlessness. Only some hardy soul ventures upon it. Virtue is a bravery so hardy that it deals in what it has no experience in.—Journal, 1 January 1842
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 are ever dying to one world and being born into another, and possibly no man knows whether he is at any time dead in the sense in which he affirms that phenomenon of another, or not.—Journal, June 1850
We begin to die, not in our senses or extremities, but in out divine faculties. Our members may be sound, our sight and hearing perfect, but our genius and imagination betray signs of decay.—Journal, 27 January 1854
We constantly anticipate repose. Yet it surely can only be the repose that is in entire and healthy activity. It must be a repose without rust.—Journal, 13 December 1841
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
