Henry David Thoreau Quotations: Sounds
I did not hear the strains after they had issued from the flute, but before they were breathed into it, for the original strain precedes the sound by as much as the echo follows after, and the rest is the perquisite of the rocks and trees and beasts.—Journal, 18 August 1841
I have been breaking silence these twenty three years and have hardly made a rent in it.—Journal, 9 February 1841
I heard a night-warbler, wood thrush, kingfisher, tweezer-bird or parti-colored warbler, and a nighthawk.—The Maine Woods
I sailed on the North River last night with my flute, and my music was a tinkling stream which meandered with the river, and fell from note to note as a brook from rock to rock.—Journal, 18 August 1841
I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect.—"Walking"
I see, smell, taste, hear, feel, that everlasting Something to which we are allied, at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very Selves; the one historic truth, the most remarkable fact which can become the distinct and uninvited subject of our thought, the actual glory of the universe; the only fact which a human being cannot avoid recognizing, or in some way forget or dispense with.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
If we can listen we shall hear.—Journal, 26 January 1841
If we did not hear, however, we did listen, not without a reasonable expectation; that at least I have to tell,—only some utterly uncivilized, big-throated owl hooted loud and dismally in the drear and boughy wilderness, plainly not nervous about his solitary life, not afraid to hear the echoes of his voice there.—The Maine Woods
It is chiefly the spring birds that I hear at this hour, and in each dawn the spring is thus revived.—Journal, 4 July 1852
Music is the sound of the circulation in nature's veins. It is the flux which melts nature.—Journal, 24 April 1841
