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

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The most stupendous scenery ceases to be sublime when it becomes distinct, or in other words limited, and the imagination is no longer encouraged to exaggerate it. The actual height and breadth of a mountain or a waterfall are always ridiculously small; they are the imagined only that content us.

Henry David Thoreau
I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is madeand at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me.

Henry David Thoreau
Some simple dishes recommend themselves to our imaginations as well as palates.

Henry David Thoreau
The gods are partial to no era, but steadily shines their light in the heavens, while the eye of the beholder is turned to stone.There was but the sun and the eye from the first. The ages have not added a new ray to the one, nor altered a fibre of the other.

Henry David Thoreau
All nations love the same jests and tales, Jews, Christians, and Mahometans, and the same translated suffice for all.

Henry David Thoreau
The husbandman is always a better Greek than the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in commemorating it.

Henry David Thoreau
The Xanthus or Scamander is not a mere dry channel and bed of a mountain torrent, but fed by the ever-flowing springs of fame...

and I trust that I may be allowed to associate our muddy but much abused Concord River with the most famous in history.

Henry David Thoreau
What avails it that another loves you, if he does not understand you? Such love is a curse.

Henry David Thoreau
Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted,but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.

Henry David Thoreau
Summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf.

Henry David Thoreau
What is called common sense is excellent in its department, and as invaluable as the virtue of conformity in the army and navy,--for there must be subordination,--but uncommon sense, that sense which is common only to the wisest, is as much more excellent as it is more rare.

Henry David Thoreau
Why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distinct? All our lives want a suitable background. They should at least, like the life of the anchorite, be as impressive to behold as objects in a desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a limitless horizon.

Henry David Thoreau
There is not so good an understanding between any two, but the exposure by the one of a serious fault in the other will produce a misunderstanding in proportion to its heinousness.

Henry David Thoreau
Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.

Henry David Thoreau
On the whole, Chaucer impresses us as greater than his reputation, and not a little like Homer and Shakespeare, for he would haveheld up his head in their company.

Henry David Thoreau
Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.

Henry David Thoreau
Christianity only hopes. It has hung its harp on the willows, and cannot sing a song in a strange land. It has dreamed a sad dream, and does not yet welcome the morning with joy. The mother tells her falsehoods to her child, but, thank heaven, the child does not grow up in its parent's shadow. Our mother's faith has not grown with her experience. Her experience has been too much for her. The lesson of life was too hard for her to learn.

Henry David Thoreau
Instead of the scream of a fish hawk scaring the fishes, is heard the whistle of the steam-engine, arousing a country to its progress.

Henry David Thoreau
There have been some nations who could do nothing but construct tombs, and these are the only traces which they have left. They are the heathen.

Henry David Thoreau
There are some things which a man never speaks of, which are much finer kept silent about. To the highest communications we only lend a silent ear.

Henry David Thoreau
The necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things to the scholar is rarely well remembered.

Henry David Thoreau
All men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground. Better are the physically dead, for they more lively rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. A man's life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant.

Henry David Thoreau
By what a delicate and far-stretched contribution every island is made! What an enterprise of nature thus to lay the foundations of and to build up the future continent, of golden and silver sands and the ruins of forests, with ant-like industry.

Henry David Thoreau
The natural historian is not a fisherman who prays for cloudy days and good luck merely; but as fishing has been styled "a contemplative man's recreation," introducing him profitably to woods and water, so the fruit of the naturalist's observations is not in new genera or species, but in new contemplations still, and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation.

Henry David Thoreau
The Indian's intercourse with Nature is at least such as admits of the greatest independence of each.

Henry David Thoreau
Every sacred book, successively, has been accepted in the faith that it was to be the final resting-place of the sojourning soul;but after all, it was but a caravansary which supplied refreshment to the traveler, and directed him farther on his way to Isphahan or Bagdat. Thank God, no Hindoo tyranny prevailed at the framing of the world, but we are freemen of the universe, and not sentenced to any caste.

Henry David Thoreau