We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.
—WaldenÂWe should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!—I know of no reading of another’s experience so startling and informing as this would be.
—WaldenWe should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create, than by its groundwork and composition. It is the morning now turned evening and seen in the west,—the same sun, but a new light and atmosphere. Its beauty is like the sunset; not a fresco painting on a wall, flat and bounded, but atmospheric and roving or free.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversWe, too, are out, obeying the same law with all nature. Not less important are the observers of the birds than the birds themselves.
—Journal, 20 March 1858Wealth cannot purchase any great private solace or convenience. Riches are only the means of sociality.
—Journal, 2 January 1842What a faculty must that be which can paint the most barren landscape and humblest life in glorious colors!
—Journal, 21 August 1851What a fine communication from age to age, of the fairest and noblest thoughts, the aspirations of ancient men, even such as were never communicated by speech, is music! It is the flower of language, thought colored and curved, fluent and flexible, its crystal fountain tinged with the sun’s rays, and its purling ripples reflecting the grass and the clouds.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversWhat are the natural features which make a township handsome? A river, with its waterfalls and meadows, a lake, a hill, a cliff or individual rocks, a forest, and ancient trees standing singly. Such things are beautiful; they have a high use which dollars and cents never represent. If the inhabitants of a town were wise, they would seek to preserve these things, though at a considerable expense; for such things educate far more than any hired teachers or preachers, or any at present recognized system of school education.
—Journal, 3 January 1861What avails it that another loves you, if he does not understand you? Such love is a curse.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversWhat does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
—Journal, 31 October 1850What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.
—WaldenWhat exercise is to the body, employment is to the mind and morals.
—Thoreau to H.G.O Blake, 27 March 1848What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I.
—"Resistance to Civil Government"What great interval is there between him who is caught in Africa and made a plantation slave of in the South, and him who is caught in New England and made a Unitarian minister of?
—Journal, 28 February 1857What have we to do with petty rumbling news? We have our own great affairs.
—Thoreau to Lidian Emerson, 20 June 1843What I have learned is mine; I’ve had my thought,
And me the Muses noble truths have taught.
What if God were to confide in us for a moment! Should we not then be gods?
—Thoreau to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 February 1843