Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them.
—"Civil Disobedience"Unpremeditated music is the true gauge which measures the current of our thoughts—the very undertow of our life’s stream.
—Journal, 18 August 1841Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ, Shakespeare, Swedenborg,—these are some of our astronomers.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversVery few men can speak of Nature with any truth. They confer no favor; they do not speak a good word for her.
—Journal, 7-10 March 1841Virtue is incalculable, as it is inestimable. Well, man’s destiny is but virtue, or manhood. It is wholly moral, to be learned only by the life of the soul.
—Journal, 3 April 1842Virtue is the deed of the bravest art which demands the greatest confidence and fearlessness. Only some hardy soul ventures upon it. Virtue is a bravery so hardy that it deals in what it has no experience in.
—Journal, 1 January 1842Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away,—passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man’s capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to!
—Journal, 19 April 1856Waves of serener life pass over us from time to time, like flakes of sunlight over the fields in cloudy weather. In some happier moment, when more sap flows in the withered stalk of our life, Syria and India stretch away from our present as they do in history. All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversWe are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outsides of freedom, the means and outmost defenses of freedom. It is our children’s children who may perchance be essentially free.
—Journal, 16 February 1851We are constantly invited to be what we are; as to something worthy and noble. I never waited but for myself to come round; none ever detained me, but I lagged or tagged after myself.
—Journal, 2 February 1841We are ever dying to one world and being born into another, and possibly no man knows whether he is at any time dead in the sense in which he affirms that phenomenon of another, or not.
—Journal, June 1850We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate . . . As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
—WaldenWe are inclined to think of all Romans who lived within five hundred years B.C. as contemporaries to each other. Yet Time moved at the same deliberate pace then as now.
—Journal, 8 December 1859We are most apt to remember and cherish the flowers which appear earliest in the spring. I look with equal affection on those which are the latest to bloom in the fall.
—Journal, 31 August 1850We asked him the names of several birds which we heard this morning. The thrush, which was quite common, and whose note he imitated, he said was called Adelungquamooktum; but sometimes he could not tell the name of some small bird which I heard and knew, but he said, “I tell all the birds about here; can’t tell littlum noise, but I see’em, then I can tell.”
—The Maine WoodsWe begin to die, not in our senses or extremities, but in out divine faculties. Our members may be sound, our sight and hearing perfect, but our genius and imagination betray signs of decay.
—Journal, 27 January 1854We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
—Walden