When you are starting away, leaving your more familiar fields, for a little adventure like a walk, you look at every object with a traveler’s, or at least with historical, eyes; you pause on the first bridge, where an ordinary walk hardly commences, and begin to observe and moralize like a traveler. It is worth the while to see your native village thus sometimes, as if you were a traveler passing through it, commenting on your neighbors as strangers.
—Journal, 4 September 1851When you travel to the celestial city, carry no letter of introduction. When you knock ask to see God—none of the servants.
—Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 27 March 1848When, as was commonly the case, I had none to commune with, I used to raise the echoes by striking with a paddle on the side of my boat, filling the surrounding woods with circling and dilating sound, stirring them up as the keeper of a menagerie of his wild beasts, until I elicited a growl from every wooded vale and hillside.
—WaldenWhere an angel travels it will be paradise all the way, but where Satan travels it will be burning marl and cinders.
—"Paradise (to be) Regained"Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them,—transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library,—aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.
—Cape CodWhether he sleeps or wakes—whether he runs or walks—whether he uses a microscope or a telescope, or his naked eye—a man never discovers anything, never overtakes anything, or leaves anything behind, but himself.
—Thoreau to H. G. O. Blake, 20 May 1860Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,—the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this,—or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the mean while, and had received a Rodgers’ penknife from his father?
—WaldenWhile he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine.
—WaldenWhile my friend was my friend he flattered me, and I never heard the truth from him, but when he became my enemy he shot it to me on a poisoned arrow.
—Journal, after 11 September 1849While we float here, far from that tributary stream on whose banks our Friends and kindred dwell, our thoughts, like the stars, come out of their horizon still; for there circulates a finer blood than Lavoisier has discovered the laws of,—the blood, not of kindred merely, but of kindness, whose pulse still beats at any distance and forever.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversWhile we were thus engaged in the twilight, we heard faintly, from far down the stream, what sounded like two strokes of a woodchopper’s axe, echoing dully through the grim solitude.
—The Maine WoodsWho could believe in prophecies of Daniel or of Miller that the world would end this summer while one Milk-weed with faith matured its seeds!
—Journal, 24 September 1851Who knows how incessant a surveillance a strong man may maintain over himself, — how far subject passion and appetite to reason, and lead the life his imagination paints?
—Journal, 21 May 1839Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb—heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board—may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!
—WaldenWho knows what sort of life would result if we had attained to purity? If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity I would go to seek him forthwith.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversWho will not confess that the necessity to get money has helped to ripen some of his schemes?
—Journal, 6 February 1852