Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another.
—Journal, 24 October 1837Every poet’s muse is circumscribed in her wanderings, and may be well said to haunt some favorite spring or mountain.
—Journal, 23 February 1842Every sunset inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down.
—Journal, 21 November 1850Ex oriente lux may still be the motto of scholars, for the Western world has not yet derived from the East all the light which it is destined to receive thence.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversExcuse our hard and cold New England manners, lay it partly to the climate: granite and ice, you know, are our chief exports.
—Thoreau to Thomas Cholmondeley, 8 November 1855Faith, indeed, is all the reform that is needed; it is itself a reform.
—"Paradise (to be) Regained"Falsehoods that glare and dazzle are sloped toward us, reflecting full in our faces even the light of the sun. Wait till sunset, or go round them, and the falsity will be apparent.
—Journal, 11 February 1840Farms are for sale all around here—and so I suppose men are for purchase.
—Thoreau to John and Cynthia Thoreau, 8 June 1843Fatal is the discovery that our friend is fallible—that he has prejudices. He is then only prejudiced in our favor.
—Journal, 15 February 1851Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation.
—WaldenFix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.
—WaldenFollow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.
—WaldenFor a companion, I require one who will make an equal demand on me with my own genius.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversFor every oak and birch too growing on the hill-top, as well as for these elms and willows, we knew that there was a graceful ethereal and ideal tree making down from the roots, and sometimes Nature in high tide brings her mirror to its foot and makes it visible.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversFor if Herodotus carried his history to Olympia to read, after the cestus and the race, have we not heard such histories recited there, which since our countrymen have read, as made Greece sometimes to be forgotten?
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers