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The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea.

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
Flight
Hawk
Wave
Elemental
Wings
Elementals
Sea
Sails
Air
Hawks
Brother
Answering
Pinions
Perfect
Surveys
Inflated
Sail
Aerial

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I am accustomed to think very long of going anywhere,--am slow to move. I hope to hear a response of the oracle first.
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Friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result. No professions nor advances will avail.... It is a drama in which the parties have no part to act.
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The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate the world....There is naked Nature, inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.
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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.
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I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority? Would you have had him wait till that time came?--till you and I came over to him?
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Instead of water we got here a draught of beer, a lumberer's drink, which would acclimate and naturalize a man at once,-which would make him see green, and, if he slept, dream that he heard the wind sough among the pines.
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So long as a man is faithful to himself, everything is in his favor, government, society, the very sun, moon, and stars.
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The gods cannot misunderstand, man cannot explain.
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In wildness is the preservation of the world.
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Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?--to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.
Henry David Thoreau
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I never yet knew the sun to be knocked down and rolled through a mud-puddle he comes out honor-bright from behind every storm. Let us then take sides with the sun, seeing we have so much leisure.
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So is the English Parliament provincial. Mere country bumpkins, they betray themselves, when any more important question arises for them to settle, the Irish question, for instance,--the English question why did I not say? Their natures are subdued to what they work in. Their good breeding respects only secondary objects.
Henry David Thoreau
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The schools begin with what they call the elements, and where do they end?
Henry David Thoreau
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Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?
Henry David Thoreau
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Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our Maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns.
Henry David Thoreau
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He may travel who can subsist on the wild fruits and game of the most cultivated country.
Henry David Thoreau
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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.
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Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons.
Henry David Thoreau
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Where is the unexplored land but in our own untried enterprises? To an adventurous spirit any place--London, New York, Worcester, or his own yard--is unexplored land, to seek which Frémont and Kane travel so far. To a sluggish and defeated spirit even the Great Basin and the Polaris are trivial places.
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I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen.
Henry David Thoreau