Quote

Men talk glibly enough about moonshine, as if they knew its qualities very well, and despised them as owls might talk of sunshine,--none of your sunshine!--but this word commonly means merely something which they do not understand,--which they are abed and asleep to, however much it may be worth their while to be up and awake to it.

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
Well
Talk
Awake
Moonshine
Enough
Word
Merely
Owls
Mean
Understand
None
Owl
Much
Means
Moon
Despised
Something
May
However
Commonly
Men
Ideas
Worth
Asleep
Wells
Knew
Sunshine
Abed
Might
Quality
Qualities
Glibly

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What would human life be without forests, those natural cities?
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We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we.
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Wealth can't buy heath, but heath can buy wealth.
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The Ethiopian cannot change his skin nor the leopard his spots.
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Every man is the builder of a temple called his body.
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The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one's appetite is not too keen.
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Art may varnish and gild, but it can do no more.
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We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn.
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The stars are distant and unobtrusive, but bright and enduring as our fairest and most memorable experiences.
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The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
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A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck.
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Life is grand, and so are its environments of Past and Future. Would the face of nature be so serene and beautiful if man's destiny were not equally so?
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When the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen.
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Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.
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Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.
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I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
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They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself.
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It is tranquil people who accomplish much.
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All that are printed and bound are not books they do not necessarily belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked with the other luxuries and appendages of civilized life. Base wares are palmed off under a thousand disguises.
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The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils.
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