Henry David Thoreau Quotations: LIFE
I suspect that the child plucks its first flower with an insight into its beauty & significance which the subsequent botanist never retains.—Journal, 5 February 1852
I sympathize with weeds perhaps more than with the crop they choke, they express so much vigor.—Journal, 24 July 1852
I think I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and fields absolutely free from all worldy engagements.—"Walking"
I think that the standing miracle to man is man. Behind the paling yonder, come rain or shine, hope or doubt, there dwells a man an actual being who can sympathize with our sublimest thoughts.—Journal, 21 May 1851
I wake up in the night to these higher levels of life, as to a day that begins to dawn, as if my intervening life had been a long night.—Journal, 13 July 1857
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Sparten-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.—Walden
I was describing the other day my success in solitary and distant woodland walking outside the town. I do not go there to get my dinner, but to get that sustenance which dinners only preserve me to enjoy, without which dinners are a vain repetition.—Journal, 11 January 1857
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.—Walden
I would not preserve the husk of life, but the kernel.—Journal, 23 December 1851
I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.—Walden
