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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

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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
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Autobiographer
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
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Henry D. Thoreau
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We live but a fraction of our lives.
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Our science, so called, is always more barren and mixed with error than our sympathies.
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The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.
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There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.
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Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.
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The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
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As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full.
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Surely one may as profitably be soaked in the juices of a swamp for one day as pick his way dry-shod over sand. Cold and damp ? are they not as rich experience as warmth and dryness?
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I am engaged to Concord and my own private pursuits by 10,000 ties, and it would be suicide to rend them.
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There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.
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Law never made men a whit more just and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.
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Morning glory is the best name, it always refreshes me to see it.
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The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailors' Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather.
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The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.
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Man makes very much such a nest for his domestic animals, of withered grass and fodder, as the squirrels and many other wild creatures do for themselves.
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While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.
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I thought, as I have my living to get, and have not eaten today, that I might go a- fishing. That's the true industry for poets. It is the only trade I have learned.
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Why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse?
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He may travel who can subsist on the wild fruits and game of the most cultivated country.
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We have reason to be grateful for celestial phenomena, for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man.
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