I kept Homer’s Iliad on my table through the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then.
—WaldenI lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well.
—WaldenI learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
—WaldenI left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.
—WaldenI live in the perpetual verdure of the globe. I die in the annual decay of nature.
—Journal, 8 March 1842I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future.
—Thoreau to H. G. O. Blake, 27 March 1848I 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 1853I look out at my eyes, I come to my window, and feel and breathe the fresh air. It is a fact equally glorious with the most inward experience.
—Journal, 23 August 1852I love men with the same distinctions that I love women—as if my friend were of some third sex—some other or stranger and still my friend.
—Journal, 5 May 1846I love my friends very much, but I find that it is of no use to go to see them. I hate them commonly when I am near them. They belie themselves and deny me continually.
—Journal, 16 November 1851I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest.
—Journal, 16 November 1850I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.
—Journal, 3 January 1853I love to see a clear crystalline water flowing out of a swamp over white sand and decayed wood, spring-like.
—Journal, 18 July 1852I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp,—tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it.
—WaldenI love to wade and flounder through the swamp now, these bitter cold days when the snow lies deep on the ground, and I need travel but little way from the town to get to a Nova Zembla solitude,—to wade through the swamps, all snowed up, untracked by man, into which the fine dry snow is still drifting till it is even with the tops of the water andromeda and halfway up the high blueberry bushes.
—Journal, 10 January 1856I make it my business to extract from Nature whatever nutriment she can furnish me though at the risk of endless iteration. I milk the sky and the earth.
—Journal, 3 November 1853I must call that swamp of E. Hubbard’s west of the Hunt Pasture, Yellow Birch Swamp. There are more of those trees than anywhere else in town that I know . . . The sight of these trees affects me more than California gold.
—Journal, 4 January 1853