Henry David Thoreau Quotations: NATURE & THE ENVIRONMENT
In Boston yesterday an ornithologist said significantly, “If you held the bird in your hand—”; but I would rather hold it in my affections.—Journal, 10 May 1854
In reality, history fluctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to evening. What is of moment is its hue and color. Time hides no treasures; we want not its then, but its now. We do not complain that the mountains in the horizon are blue and indistinct; they are the more like the heavens.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
In short, all good things are wild and free.—"Walking"
In society you will not find health, but in nature.—"Natural History of Massachusetts"
In summer it is the earth's liquid eye, a mirror in the breast of nature.—"A Winter Walk"
In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since.—Walden
In the night the eyes are partly closed or retire into the head. Other senses take the lead. The walker is guided as well by the sense of smell. Every plant and field and forest emits its odor now, swamp-pink in the meadow and tansy in the road; and there is the peculiar dry scent of corn which has begun to show its tassels.—Cape Cod
In this bank, above the clay, I counted in the summer, two hundred holes of the Bank Swallow within a space six rods long, and there were at least one thousand old birds within three times that distance, twittering over the surf.—Cape Cod
In Wildness is the preservation of the World.—"Walking"
Instead of the white lily, which requires mud, or the common sweet flag, the blue flag (Iris versicolor) grows thinly in the pure water, rising from the stony bottom all around the shore, where it is visited by hummingbirds in June . . .—Walden
