My pen is a lever which, in proportion as the near end stirs me further within, the further end reaches to a greater depth in the reader.
—Journal, 4 August 1841My thought is part of the meaning of the world, and hence I use a part of the world as a symbol to express my thought.
—Journal, 4 November 1852My work is writing, and I do not hesitate, though I know that no subject is too trivial for me, tried by ordinary standards; for, ye fools, the theme is nothing, the life is everything.
—Journal, 18 October 1856Nature has found her hoarse summer voice again, like the lowing of a cow let out to the pasture. It is Nature’s rutting season.
—Journal, 19 May 1856Nature is a greater and more perfect art, the art of God.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversNature is beautiful as in repose, not promising a higher beauty to-morrow. Her actions are level to one another, and so are never unfit or inconsistent.
—Journal, 7-10 March 1841Nature makes no noise. The howling storm, the rustling leaf, the pattering rain are no disturbance, there is an essential and unexplored harmony in them.
—Journal, 18 November 1837Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life.
—"Natural History of Massachusetts"Nature works by contraries. That which in summer was most fluid and unresting is now most solid and motionless.
—Journal, 11 February 1859Nature would not appear so rich, the profusion so rich, if we knew a use for everything.
—Journal, 11 August 1853New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial at all. That is the uncommon school we want. Instead of noble men, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.
—WaldenNew Hampshire courts have lately been deciding—as if it was for them to decide—whether the top of Mt. Washington belonged to A or to B; and, it begin decided in favor of B, as I hear, he went up one winter with the proper officer and took formal possession of it. But I think that the top of Mt. Washington should not be private property; it should be left unappropriated for modesty and reverence’s sake, or if only to suggest that earth has higher uses than we put her to.
—Journal, 3 January 1861No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions.’ It is indeed all that we do not know.
—Journal, January 1840No doubt the healthiest man in the world is prevented from doing what he would like sickness.
—Journal, 21 December 1855