The senses both of hearing and smelling are more alert. We hear the tinkling of rills which we never detected before.
—Cape CodThe senses of children are unprofaned. Their whole body is one sense. They take a physical pleasure in riding on a rail.
—Journal, 7 July 1851The sharp whistle of the blackbird, too, is heard like single sparks or a shower of them shot up from the swamps and seen against the dark winter in the rear.
—Journal, 2 March 1859The silence rings—it is musical & thrills me. A night in which the silence was audible—I hear the unspeakable.
—Journal, 21 January 1853The social condition of genius is the same in all ages. Aeschylus was undoubtedly alone and without sympathy in his simple reverence for the mystery of the universe.
—Journal, 29 January 1840The spring comes earlier to that dooryard than to any, and summer lingers longest there.
—Journal, 26 November 1857The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.
—WaldenThe success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.
—WaldenThe sum of what the writer of what ever class has to report is simply some human experience, whether he be poet or philosopher or man of science.
—Journal, 6 May 1854The sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust and confusion; and when we meet with any cheering fact which implies the presence of this luminary, we excerpt and modernize it.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversThe too exquisitely cultured I avoid as I do the theater. Their life lacks reality. They offer me wine instead of water. They are surrounded by things that can be bought.
—Journal, 26 June 1852The traveler Burton says of it—“Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded. . . In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence.”
—"Walking"The trees now in the rain look heavy and rich all day, as commonly at twilight, drooping with the weight of wet leaves.
—Journal, 17 July 1852The true student will cleave ever to the good, recognizing no Past, no Present; but wherever he emerges from the bosom of time, his course is not with the sun,—eastward or westward,—but ever towards the seashore.
—Journal, 15 February 1838The truest account of heaven is the fairest & I will accept none which disappoints expectation. It is more glorious to expect a better, than to enjoy a worse.
—Journal, 26 January 1852The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.
—Walden