Henry David Thoreau Quotations: NATURE & THE ENVIRONMENT
Then the gentle, spring-like rain begins, and we turn about. The sounds of it pattering on the dry oak leaves . . .—Journal, 14 February 1859
There are odors enough in nature to remind you of everything if you had lost every sense but smell.—Journal, 6 May 1852
There are two world, the post-office and nature. I know them both.—Journal, 3 January 1853
There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his sense still.—Walden
There is no law so strong which a little gladness may not transgress. Pile up your books, the records of sadness, your saws and your laws. Nature is glad outside, and her merry worms within will ere long topple them down.—Journal, 3 January 1853
There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest.—Walden
There is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation; yet with every year I am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wisdom; at present I am no fisherman at all. But I see that if I were to live in a wilderness I should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest.—Walden
These modern ingenious sciences and arts do not affect me as those more venerable arts of hunting and fishing, and even of husbandry in its primitive and simple form; as ancient and honorable trades as the sun and moon and winds pursue, coeval with the faculties of man, and invented when these were invented.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
These two are prevailing grasses at this season on dry and sandy fields and hillsides. The culms of both, not to mention their pretty flowers, reflect a purple tinge, and help declare the ripeness of the year.—"Autumnal Tints"
Thus a man shall lead his life away from here on the edge of the wilderness, in Indian Millinocket stream, in a new world, far in the dark of a continent, and have a flute to play at evening here, while his strains echo to the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live, as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man.—The Maine Woods
