Henry David Thoreau Quotations: TIME
I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me.—Journal, 22 June 1853
I must live above all in the the present.—Journal, 7 January 1851
I sometimes awake in the night and think of friendship and its possibilities, a new life and revelation to me, which perhaps I had not experienced for many months.—Journal, 13 July 1857
I wake up in the night to these higher levels of life, as to a day that begins to dawn, as if my intervening life had been a long night.—Journal, 13 July 1857
If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.—"Life Without Principle"
If we can forget, we have done somewhat; if we can remember, we have done somewhat. Let us remember this.—Journal, 7 July 1845
In all the dissertations on language, men forget the language. that is, that is really universal, the inexpressible meaning that is in all things and everywhere, with which the morning and evening teem.—Journal, 23 August 1845
In reality, history fluctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to evening. What is of moment is its hue and color. Time hides no treasures; we want not its then, but its now. We do not complain that the mountains in the horizon are blue and indistinct; they are the more like the heavens.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat–Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions.—Walden
