Henry David Thoreau Quotations: Senses
The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it.—Walden
The prosaic mind sees things badly, or with the bodily sense; but the poet sees them clad in beauty, with the spiritual sense.—Journal, 9 December 1859
The senses both of hearing and smelling are more alert. We hear the tinkling of rills which we never detected before.—Cape Cod
The senses of children are unprofaned. Their whole body is one sense. They take a physical pleasure in riding on a rail.—Journal, 7 July 1851
Their reflections fell on the eye like a clash of cymbals on the ear.—A Yankee in Canada
There are odors enough in nature to remind you of everything if you had lost every sense but smell.—Journal, 6 May 1852
There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his sense still.—Walden
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 need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. Our present senses are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become. We are comparatively deaf and dumb and blind, and without smell or taste or feeling.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
We need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hearing the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.—Walden
