Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets.
—Journal, 3o November 1841Greatness is in the ascent. But there is no accounting for the little men.
—Journal, 7 February 1841He is a wise man and experienced who has taken many views; to whom stones and plants and animals and a myriad objects have each suggested something, contributed something.
—Journal, 4 September 1851He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.
—"Walking"He is the true artist whose life is his material; every stroke of the chisel must enter his own flesh and bone and not grate dully on marble.
—Journal, 23 June 1840He sketches first, with strong, practical English pencil, the essential features in outline, black on white, more faithfully that Dryasdust would have done, telling us wisely whom and what to mark, to save time, and then with a brush of camel’s hair, or sometimes with more expeditious swab, he lays on the bright and fast colors of his humor everywhere.
—"Thomas Carlyle and His Works"He who cannot read is worse than deaf and blind, is yet but half alive, is still-born.
—Journal, 10 March 1856He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.
—WaldenHe who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversHe will take a false step never, even in the most arduous times, for then the music will not fail to swell into greater sweetness and volume, and itself rule the movement it inspired.
—Journal, 30 June 1840Here and there a pilot-boat was towing its little boat astern toward some distant foreigner who had just fired a gun, the echo of which along the shore sounded like the caving of the bank.
—Cape CodHis humor is always subordinate to a serious purpose, though often the real charm for the reader is not so much in the essential progress and final upshot of this chapter, as in this indirect side-light illustration of every hue.
—"Thomas Carlyle and His Works"History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversHistory has remembered thee; especially that meek and humble petition of thy old planters, like the wailing of the Lord’s own people, “To the gentlemen, the selectmen” of Concord, praying to be erected into a separate parish.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversHomer has never yet been printed in English, nor Æschylus, nor Virgil even—works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients.
—WaldenHope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.
—"Walking"