Henry David Thoreau - A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

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It is but too easy to establish another durable and harmonious routine. Immediately all parts of nature consent to it. Only make something to take the place of something, and men will behave as if it was the very thing they wanted.

Henry David Thoreau
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.

Henry David Thoreau
The stars are distant and unobtrusive, but bright and enduring as our fairest and most memorable experiences.

Henry David Thoreau
There is a certain perfection in accident which we never consciously attain.

Henry David Thoreau
In respect to religion and the healing art, all nations are still in a state of barbarism. In the most civilized countries the priest is still but a Powwow, and the physician a Great Medicine.

Henry David Thoreau
Faint heart never won true friend. O my friend, may it come to pass, once, that when you are my friend I may be yours.

Henry David Thoreau
There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it.

Henry David Thoreau
The whole of the day should not be daytime; there should be one hour, if not more, which the day did not bring forth.

Henry David Thoreau
Surely, we are provided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ, Shakespeare, Swedenborg,--these are some of our astronomers.

Henry David Thoreau
It is a great pleasure to escape sometimes from the restless class of Reformers. What if these grievances exist? So do you and I.

Henry David Thoreau
Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.

Henry David Thoreau
There has always been the same amount of light in the world. The new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses, do not affect thegeneral illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them.

Henry David Thoreau
When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that nature wears so well. The landscape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it yet.

Henry David Thoreau
Where shall we look for standard English, but to the words of a standard man?

Henry David Thoreau
All these sounds, the crowing of cocks, the baying of dogs, and the hum of insects at noon, are the evidence of nature's health orsound state.

Henry David Thoreau
The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.

Henry David Thoreau
The very austerity of the Brahmans is tempting to the devotional soul, as a more refined and nobler luxury. Wants so easily and gracefully satisfied seem like a more refined pleasure. Their conception of creation is peaceful as a dream.

Henry David Thoreau
Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays.

Henry David Thoreau
I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once moreonly the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,--those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.

Henry David Thoreau
There are various tough problems yet to solve, and we must shift to live, betwixt spirit and matter, such a human life as we can.

Henry David Thoreau
It is said that a rogue does not look you in the face, neither does an honest man look at you as if he had his reputation to establish.

Henry David Thoreau
The pickerel... the swiftest, wariest, and most ravenous of fishes.

Henry David Thoreau
There is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but the farthest east.

Henry David Thoreau
There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains itsmaxims. It has no temple, nor even a solitary column. There goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore. The hunter has found only fragments of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants.

Henry David Thoreau
In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.

Henry David Thoreau
You cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that which shocks you.

Henry David Thoreau
He who receives an injury is to some extent an accomplice of the wrong-doer.

Henry David Thoreau
Your scheme must be the framework of the universe; all other schemes will soon be ruins.

Henry David Thoreau
There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.

Henry David Thoreau
In all her products, Nature only develops her simplest germs. One would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create birds. The hawk which now takes his flight over the top of the wood was at first, perchance, only a leaf which fluttered in its aisles. From rustling leaves she came in the course of ages to the loftier flight and clear carol of the bird.

Henry David Thoreau