Henry David Thoreau Quotations: OBSERVATIONS
Our circumstances answer to our expectations and the demand of our natures.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Our most beautiful fern, and most suitable for wreaths or garlands. It is rare.—Journal, 30 July 1853
Our reflections had already acquired a historical remoteness from the scenes we had left, and we ourselves essayed to sing.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Painted by the frosts, some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red, or crimson, as if their spheres had regularly revolved, and enjoyed the influence of the sun on all sides alike,—some with the faintest pink blush imaginable,—some brindled with deep red streaks like a cow, or with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running regularly from the stem-dimple to the blossom end, like meridional lines, on a straw-colored ground,—some touched with a greenish rust, like a fine lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or less confluent and fiery when wet,—and others gnarly, and freckled or peppered all over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a white ground, as if accidentally sprinkled from the brush of Him who paints the autumn leaves.—"Wild Apples"
Perchance, in the afternoon of such a day, when the water is perfectly calm and full of reflections, I paddle gently down the main stream, and, turning up the Assabet, reach a quiet cove, where I unexpectedly find myself surrounded by myriads of leaves, like fellow-voyagers, which seem to have the same purpose, or want of purpose, with myself.—"Autumnal Tints"
Perhaps an instinct survives through the intensest actual love, which prevents entire abandonment and devotion, and makes the most ardent lover a little reserved. It is the anticipation of change.—Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 23 September 1852
Revolutions are never sudden. Not one man, nor many men, in a few years or generations, suffice to regulate events and dispose mankind for the revolutionary movement. The hero is but the crowning stone of the pyramid,—the keystone of the arch.—Journal, 27 December 1837
Seeing at that moment three little red birds fly out of a crevice in the ruins, up into an arbor-vitae tree, which grew out of them, I asked him their names, in such French as I could muster, but he neither understood me or ornithology . . .—A Yankee in Canada
Silence is the communing of conscious soul with itself.—Journal, December 1838
Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs.—Walden
