Henry David Thoreau Quotations: RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY
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
I must not be for myself, but God's work, and that is always good.—Journal, 11 March 1842
I rise into a diviner atmosphere, in which simply to exist and breathe is a triumph, and my thoughts inevitably tend toward the grand and infinite, as aeronauts report that there is ever an upper current hereabouts which sets toward the ocean. If they rise high enough they go out to sea, and behold the vessels seemingly in mid-air like themselves. It is as if I were serenaded, and the highest and truest compliments were paid me. The universe gives me three cheers.—Journal, 13 July 1857
I suppose that what in other men is religion is in me love of nature.—Journal, 30 October 1842
I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen.—"Walking"
If a man do not revive with nature in the spring, how shall he revive when a white-collared priest prays for him? —Journal, 20 March 1858
If Christ should appear on earth he could on all hands be denounced as a mistaken, misguided man, insane and crazed.—Journal, 19 October 1859
If it were not for death and funerals I think the institution of the Church would not stand longer.—Journal, 16 November 1851
In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven.—WaldenÂ
In comparison with the philosophers of the East, we may say that modern Europe has yet given birth to none. Beside the vast and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, even our Shakespeare seems sometimes youthfully green and practical merely.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
