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Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure.

Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Poet
Translator
Writer
birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Civilization
Whose
Give
Giving
Wildness
Glance
Glances
Endure

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Alas! the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe.
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I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
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Friends are made for caring and sharing. Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.
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If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
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How sweet it would be to treat men and things, for an hour, for just what they are!
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The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell.
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What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
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Go confidently ... Live the life that you imagined.
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As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented.
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Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any rocks at least as well covered with lichens,and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome or Greece, Etruria or Carthage, or Egypt or Babylon, on these are our cliffs bare?
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One should be always on the trail of one's own deepest nature. For it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature that connects you to the Divine.
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If it is the result of a pure love, there can be nothing sensual in marriage. Chastity is something positive, not negative. It isthe virtue of the married especially. All lusts or base pleasures must give place to loftier delights. They who meet as superior beings cannot perform the deeds of inferior ones.
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For things to change, we must change.
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Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art.
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So far as my experience goes, travelers generally exaggerate the difficulties of the way. Like most evil, the difficulty is imaginary for what's the hurry?
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The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers.
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The books for young people say a great deal about the selection of Friends it is because they really have nothing to say about Friends. They mean associates and confidants merely.
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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.
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Indeed, the Englishman's history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.
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Spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.
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