We live too fast and coarsely, just as we eat too fast, and do not know the true savor of our food.
—Journal, 28 December 1852We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is the color of colors.
—"Autumnal Tints"We love to talk with those who can make a good guess at us—not with those who talk to us as if we were somebody else all the while.
—Journal, 9 September 1852We made many a “bran new” theory of life over a thin dish of gruel, which combined the advantages of conviviality with the clear-headedness which philosophy requires.
—WaldenWe managed to keep our thoughts dry, however, and only our clothes were wet.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversWe may not even see the bare ground, and hardly the water, and yet we sit down and warm our spirits annually with this distant prospect of spring.
—Journal, 2 March 1859We might so simplify the rules of moral philosophy, as well as of arithmetic, that one formula would express them both. All the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of the words by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already supernatural philosophy.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversWe must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in out soundest sleep.
—WaldenWe need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. Our present senses are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become. We are comparatively deaf and dumb and blind, and without smell or taste or feeling.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversWe need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hearing the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.
—WaldenWe never exchange more than three words with a Friend in our lives on that level to which our thoughts and feelings almost habitually rise.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversWe occasionally meet an individual of a character and disposition so entirely the reverse of our own that we wonder if he can indeed be another man like ourselves. We doubt if we ever could draw any nearer to him, and understand him.
—Journal, 7 May 1838We remember autumn to best advantage in the spring; the finest aroma of it reaches us then.
—Journal, 9 May 1852We rowed leisurely up the stream for several hours, until the sun had got high in the sky, our thoughts monotonously beating time to our oars. For outward variety there was only the river and the receding shores, a vista continually opening behind and closing before us, as we sat with our backs up-stream; and, for inward, such thoughts as the muses grudgingly lent us.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversWe saw one school-house in our walk, and listened to the sounds which issued from it; but it appeared like a place where the process, not of enlightening, but of obfuscating the mind was going on, and the pupils received only so much light as could penetrate the shadow of the Catholic church.
—A Yankee in CanadaWe seem to have forgotten that the expression “a liberal education” originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only. But taking a hint from the word, I would go a step further and say, that it is not the man of wealth and leisure simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a true sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and free man.
—"The Last Days of John Brown"We seem to hear the music of a thought, and care not if the understanding be not gratified.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversWe seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by man.
—The Maine WoodsWe should endeavor practically in our lives to correct all the defects which our imagination detects.
—Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 2 May 1848