Henry David Thoreau

“ So the human life but dies down to the surface of Nature; but puts forth its green blade to eternity. When the ground is completely bare of snow, and a few warm days have dried its surface, it is pleasant to compare the faint tender signs of the infant year, just peeping forth, with the stately beauty of the withered vegetation which has withstood the winter. The various thistles which have not yet sown their seeds; the graceful reeds and rushes, whose winter is more gay and stately than their summer, as if not till then was their beauty ripe. ”

“ No things can be farther asunder than friends estranged; our courses inevitably diverge, and we feel the fibres being rent. What can restore him to life for me? This miracle was never performed. Shall I never see him more? What fate has driven a wedge between us? Friends estranged are buried alive to one another; we miss them from their accustomed place. Let us endeavor, then, to save the lives of our friends as long as we can. Two were not made to stand in company always. Where are they who were once our friends, but are so no longer? Where are we whose friend is dead? are we in this world? ”

“ In many parts the Merrimac is as wild and natural as ever, and the shore and surrounding scenery exhibit only the revolutions of Nature. The pine stands up erect on its brink, and the alders and willows fringe its edge; only the beaver and the red man have departed.
Through the din and desultoriness even of a Byzantine noon is seen the fresh and primitive and savage nature in which Scythians and Ethiopians dwell. What is echo? what are light and shade, day and night, ocean and stars, earthquake and eclipse, then? The works of man, which we call art, are swallowed up in immensity. ”

“ I walked through New York yesterday, and met no real and living person. I love to think of dormice and all the tribe of dormant creatures, who have such a superfluity of life, while man is pining; enveloped in thick folds of life impervious to winter. I love to think, as I walk over the snowy plain, of those happy dreamers that lie in the sod. The poet is a sort of dormouse; early in the autumn he goes into winter-quarters till the sun shall fetch the year about. But most men lead a starved existence, like hawks that would fain keep on the wing and trust to pick up a sparrow now and then. ”

“ Strictly speaking, there can be no criticism of poetry other than a separating of that which is poetry from that which is not,—a detecting of falsehood. From the remotest antiquity we detect in the literature of all nations, here and there, words of a loftier tone and purport than are required to transact the daily business of life. As Scott says, they float down the sea of time like the fragments of a parted wreck,—sounds which echo up among the stars rather than through the valleys of earth; and yet are heard plainly enough, to remind men of other spheres of life and activity. ”

“ When our companion fails us we transfer our love instantaneously to a worthy object,—as the sunlight which gilds the walls and fences, when these are removed falls instantaneously on the mountains and domes and spires in the horizon. . . . Actually I have no friend. I am very distant from all actual persons,—and yet my experience of friendship is so real and engrossing that I sometimes find myself speaking aloud to the ideal friend.
A friend in need is not a friend indeed,—for all the world are our friends then. What we need is a friend. ”

“ They seem like a race who have exhausted the secrets of Nature; tanned with age, while this younger and still fair Saxon race, on whom the sun has not long shone, is but commencing its career. Their memory is in harmony with the russet hue of the fall of the year. And yet they did not always retreat before the ravages of time,—more than before the arrows of their foes. These relics in the fields, which have preserved their rugged forms so long, are evidence of the vital energy of the people that made them. Wherever I go, I am still on the track of the Indian. ”

“ Nature is a greater and more perfect art. When the overhanging pine drops into the water; by the action of the sun, and the wind rubbing it against the shore, its boughs are worn white and smooth, and take fantastic forms as if turned by a lathe. She has perfected herself by an eternity of practice. Consider the evening stealing over the fields. The stars come to bathe in retired waters; the shadows of the trees creeping farther and farther into the meadows, and a myriad phenomena beside. Nature supplies inexhaustible means by the most frugal methods. ”

“ In the veins and fibres of the leaf see the future tree,—the grove. It is the print of Nature's footstep,—this form. See how Nature works and produces leaves. It is her symbol, her standard, emblem, device; where she has been she leaves her patterns. Whether in ice or air, vegetable or coral, she works the same figure. Set away a jar in the dark, and mould-leaves make haste to grow over it; and "clothe the naked" is the omnipresent and everlasting law. Nature has only to breathe on the glass and the form of leaves appears. ”

“ Is not here the true anatomy, where we study our own elements and composition? Why should man love the sunflower, and the color of the walls and trees?
Thursday, November 2. I believe that there is an ideal or real Nature, infinitely more perfect than the actual, as there is an ideal life of man; else where are the glorious summers which in vision sometimes visit my brain? When Nature ceases to be supernatural to a man, what will he do then? Of what worth is human life if its actions are no longer to have this sublime and unexplored scenery? ”

“ He whom we associate with our daily affairs is our acquaintance. He whom we associate with our social joys is what the world commonly calls our friend. He whom we associate with our Elysium is beloved by us.
I have a friend whom I heartily love, whom I would always treat tenderly; who indeed is so transfigured to me that I dare not identify my ideal with the actual. The fit time has never come for that. If I could believe that my friend would tenderly and wisely enough sustain the declaration of my love, I should make him privy to my dreams. ”

“ She has exerted the influence of a goddess over me; cultivating my gentler humane nature; cultivating and preserving purity, innocence, truth.
We lose our friends when we cease to be friends, not when they die; then they depart; then we are sad and go into mourning for them. Death is no separation compared with that which takes place when we cease to have confidence in those with whom we have walked in confidence. When we cease to love one whom we had loved; when we know him no more ”

“ The oldest villagers are more indebted to the neighborhood of wild Nature than to the operations of man's creation.
There is something indescribably wild and beautiful in the aspect of the forests, skirting and occasionally getting in to the midst of new towns; which, like the sand-heaps of fresh fox-burrows, have sprung up in their midst. The uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of Nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine still flourishes and the jay still screams. ”

“ By a well-directed silence I have sometimes seen threatening and troublesome persons routed,—unconsciously and innocently, no doubt. You sit musing, as if you were in broad nature again; they cannot stand it; their position becomes more and more uncomfortable every moment. So much humanity over against one without any disguise,—not even the disguise of speech! With a little silence, things take shape as they should. ”

“ The hardest material obeys the same law with the most fluid. Trees are but rivers of sap and woody fibre, flowing from the atmosphere and emptying into the earth by their trunks; as their roots, on the other hand, flow upward to the surface. And in the heavens there are rivers of stars and Milky Ways. There are rivers of rock on the surface, and rivers of ore in the bowels of the earth. And our thoughts flow and circulate, and lapse into the current year. As things flow they circulate, and all streams are tributary to the ocean, which itself does not stream. ”

“ Music is strangely allied to the past. Every era has its strain. It awakens and colors my memories.
The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever. The first silvery warblings heard over the bare and dank fields, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell. What, then, are histories, chronologies, and all written revelations? Flakes of warm sunlight fall on the congealed fields. The brooks and rills sing carols and glees for the spring. The marsh-hawk already seeks the first stirring life that awakes. ”

“ There are very few fibres in the stone, very little organism. Sometimes we are conscious of the simple, but slow and insensate, life in which it lives. We are mere pudding-stone or scoriæ in the world. But suddenly we may be informed with new life, and pass through all the scales of being, up to the most complex and nearest to God,—furnished with countless nerves, and imbibing more and more of vital air or inspiration.
How suddenly and intently do all the eras which we call history awaken and glimmer in us,—all the dynasties that have passed away are still passing in our memory. ”

“ When we hear any musical sound in Nature, it is as if it were a bell ringing; we feel that we are not belated, but in season wholly, and enjoy a pensive and leisure hour. What a fine and beautiful communication from age to age of the fairest and noblest thoughts,—the aspirations of ancient men preserved,—even such as were never communicated by speech,—is music! ”

“ All that is told of mankind,—of the inhabitants of the Upper Nile, and the Sunderbunds, and Timbuctoo, and the Orinoko, is experience there. And there have lived original and free-thinking men, perhaps,—those men of whom we read in the history of New Hampshire.
While we were engaged in these reflections, and thought ourselves the only navigators of this water, suddenly a canal-boat, like some huge river-horse, with its large sail set, glided round a point before us, and changed the scene in an instant. ”

“ The wildest scenes even have an air of domesticity and homeliness to the citizen, and when the flicker's cackle is heard in the clearings, he is reminded that civilization has imported nothing into them. Science is welcome to their deepest recesses, for there, too, Nature obeys the same old civil laws. The little red bug on the stump of a pine,—for him the wind shifts, and the sun breaks through the clouds. ”

“ It is not the fertile ground we walk upon, but the leaves that flutter over our heads. The newest is but the oldest, made visible to our senses. When we dig up the soil from a thousand feet below the surface, we call it, and the plants which spring from it, new; and when our vision pierces deeper into space, and detects a remoter star, we call that new also. It had shone only to itself, and quite superior to our observation. And now in an instant and distinctly it is shown to these woods as if its rays had travelled hither from Eternity. ”

“ You can see up and down the Merrimac several miles each way. The broad and straight river, full of light and life, with its sparkling and foaming falls, the islet which divides the stream, the village of Hooksett on the shore almost directly under your feet,—so near that you can converse with its inhabitants, or throw a stone into its yards,—the woodland lake at its western base, and the mountains in the north and northeast, make a scene of rare beauty and completeness. ”

“ With this propitious breeze and the additional help of our oars, we soon reached the Falls of Amoskeag at the mouth of the Piscataquoag, and recognized, as we passed rapidly by, many a fair bank and islet upon which our thoughts had rested on the upward passage. All the world reposes in beauty to him who preserves equipoise in his life, and moves serenely on his path without resistance, as he who sails down a stream. He has only to steer, keeping his boat in the middle of the stream and carrying it round the portages. ”