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Henry David Thoreau -
Nature
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There have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty and ampleness of Nature herself.
Henry David Thoreau
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Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?... We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.
Henry David Thoreau
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Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children. Consider the silent influencewhich flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified there.
Henry David Thoreau
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Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another. The oak dies down to the ground, leaving within its rind a rich virgin mold, which will impart a vigorous life to an infant forest.
Henry David Thoreau
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The best poets, after all, exhibit only a tame and civil side of nature. They have not seen the west side of any mountain.
Henry David Thoreau
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Our circumstances answer to our expectations and the demand of our natures.
Henry David Thoreau
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I already, and for weeks afterward, felt my nature the coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was reminded that ourlife should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower.
Henry David Thoreau
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Hence it will not do for the Landlord to possess too fine a nature.... He must have no idiosyncracies, no particular bents or tendencies to this or that, but a general, uniform, and healthy development, such as his portly person indicates, offering himself equally on all sides to men.
Henry David Thoreau
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When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the winterdecent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears.
Henry David Thoreau
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Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved bythem. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows.
Henry David Thoreau
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I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.
Henry David Thoreau
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For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out.
Henry David Thoreau
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The nonchalance and dolce-far-niente air of nature and society hint at infinite periods in the progress of mankind.
Henry David Thoreau
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If I am overflowing with life, am rich in experience for which I lack expression, then nature will be my language full of poetry - all nature will fable, and every natural phenomenon be a myth.
Henry David Thoreau
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Yet the New Testament treats of man and man's so-called spiritual affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to alone content me, who am not interested solely in man's religious or moral nature, or in man even.
Henry David Thoreau
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I hate museums - there is nothing so weighs upon my spirits. They are the catacombs of nature.... They are dead nature collected by dead men. I know not whether I muse most - at the bodies stuffed with cotton and sawdust - or those stuffed with bowels and fleshy fibre outside the cases.
Henry David Thoreau
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Surely the fates are forever kind, though Nature's laws are more immutable than any despot's, yet to man's daily life they rarelyseem rigid, but permit him to relax with license in summer weather. He is not harshly reminded of the things he may not do.
Henry David Thoreau
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I noticed, as I had done before, that there was a lull among the mosquitoes about midnight, and that they began again in the morning. Nature is thus merciful. But apparently they need rest as well as we.
Henry David Thoreau
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Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them.
Henry David Thoreau
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Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.
Henry David Thoreau
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Even Nature is observed to have her playful moods or aspects, of which man sometimes seems to be the sport.
Henry David Thoreau
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I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side,... to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves.
Henry David Thoreau
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A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky.
Henry David Thoreau
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Nature is not made after such a fashion as we would have her. We piously exaggerate her wonders, as the scenery around our home.
Henry David Thoreau
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The man of science, who is not seeking for expression but for a fact to be expressed merely, studies nature as a dead language. I pray for such inward experience as will make nature significant.
Henry David Thoreau
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Henry David Thoreau
Creative Commons
Born:
July 12, 1817
Died:
May 6, 1862
(aged 44)
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