Henry David Thoreau Quotations: OBSERVATIONS
To what end do I lead a simple life at all, pray? That I may teach others to simplify their lives? — and so all our lives be simplified merely, like an algebraic formula? Or not, rather, that I may make use of the ground I have cleared to live more worthily and profitably?—Thoreau to H. G. O. Blake, 26 September 1855
Truth is ever returning into herself. I glimpse one feature to-day, another to-morrow; and the next day they are blended.—Journal, 13 November 1837
Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away,—passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man’s capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to!—Journal, 19 April 1856
We are constantly invited to be what we are; as to something worthy and noble. I never waited but for myself to come round; none ever detained me, but I lagged or tagged after myself.—Journal, 2 February 1841
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate . . . As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.—Walden
We are independent of the change we detect.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
We are most apt to remember and cherish the flowers which appear earliest in the spring. I look with equal affection on those which are the latest to bloom in the fall.—Journal, 31 August 1850
We cannot see anything unless we are possessed with the idea of it, and then we can hardly see anything else.—Journal, 4 November 1858
We constantly anticipate repose. Yet it surely can only be the repose that is in entire and healthy activity. It must be a repose without rust.—Journal, 13 December 1841
We could get no further into the Aeneid than—atque altae moenia Romae,—and the wall of high Rome, before we were constrained to reflect by what myriad tests a work of genius has to be tried; that Virgil, away in Rome, two thousand years off, should have to unfold his meaning, the inspiration of Italian vales, to the pilgrim on New England hills.—"A Walk to Wachusett"
