When I hear music I fear no danger, I am invulnerable, I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest.
—Journal, 13 January 1857When I hear music, I flutter, and am the scene of life, as a fleet of merchantmen when the wind rises.
—Journal, 24 April 1841[W]hen I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I don’t know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it.
—WaldenWhen I read an indifferent book, it seems the best thing I can do, but the inspiring volume hardly leaves me leisure to finish its latter pages. It is slipping out of my fingers while I read. It creates no atmosphere in which it may be perused, but one in which its teachings may be practiced. It confers on me such wealth that I lay it down with regret. What I began by reading I must finish by acting.
—Journal, 19 February 1841When I was four years old, as well I remember, I was brought from Boston to this my native town, through these very woods and this field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest scenes stamped in my memory. And now to-night my flute has waked the echoes over that very water.
—WaldenWhen I witness the first plowing and planting, I acquire a long-lost confidence in the earth,—that it will nourish the seed that is committed to its bosom.
—Journal, 28 March 1857When in rare moments our whole being strives with one consent, which we name a yearning, we may not hope that our work will stand in any artist’s gallery on earth.
—"The Service"When it was proposed to me to go abroad, rub oft some rust, and better my condition in a worldly sense, I fear lest my life will lose some of its homeliness. If these fields and streams and woods, the phenomena of nature here, and the simple occupations of the inhabitants should cease to interest and inspire me, no culture or wealth would atone for the loss.
—Journal, 11 March 1856When life looks sandy and barren, is reduced to its lowest terms, we have no appetite, and it has no flavor, then let me visit such a swamp as this, deep and impenetrable, where the earth quakes for a rod around you at every step, with its open water where the swallows skim and twitter, its meadow and cotton-grass, its dense patches of dwarf andromeda, now brownish-green, with clumps of blueberry bushes, its spruces and its verdurous border of woods imbowering it on every side.
—Journal, 17 July 1852When my eye ranges over some 30 miles of this globe’s surface,—an eminence—green and waving with sky and mountains to bound it,—I am richer than Croesus.
—Journal, 12 May 1850When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop.
—WaldenWhen once I have learned my place in the sphere I will fill it once for all.
—Journal, 4 February 1841When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.
—WaldenWhen out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversWhen the common man looks into the sky, which he has not so much profaned, he thinks it less gross than the earth, and with reverence speaks of “the Heavens,” but the seer will in the same sense speak of “the Earths,” and his Father who is in them.
—WaldenWhen the frogs dream, and the grass waves, and the buttercups toss their heads, and the heat disposes to bathe in the ponds and streams, then is summer begun.
—Journal, 8 June 1850When we are shocked at vice we express a lingering sympathy with it. Dry rot, rust, and mildew shock no man, for none is subject to them.
—Journal, 22 June 1840When we cease to sympathize with and to be personally related to men, and begin to universally related, then we are capable of inspiring others with the sentiment of love for us.
—Journal, June 1850When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?
—"Walking"