Henry David Thoreau Quotations: Nature
Go and measure to what length the silvery willows catkins have crept out beyond their scales, if you would know what time o' the year it is by Nature's clock.—Journal, 2 March 1859
Here and there a pilot-boat was towing its little boat astern toward some distant foreigner who had just fired a gun, the echo of which along the shore sounded like the caving of the bank.—Cape Cod
How happens it we reverence the stones which fall from another planet, and not the stones which belong to this—another globe, not this—heaven, and not earth? Are not the stones in Hodge’s wall as good as the aerolite at Mecca? Is not our broad back-door-stone as good as any corner-stone in heaven.—Journal, 30 August 1856
How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health! The discipline of the schools or of business can never impart such serenity to the mind.—Journal, 6 May 1851
How much Nature herself suffers from drought! It seems quite as much as she can do to produce these crops.—Journal, 19 August 1851
I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.—Journal, February 1851
I enter a swamp as a sacred place—a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength—the marrow of Nature.—"Walking"
I have a room all to myself; it is Nature.—Journal, 3 January 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 Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.—Journal, 3 January 1853
