Henry David Thoreau Quotations: RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY
It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot know in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun: Ὡς τὶ νοῶν, οὐ κεῖνον νοήσεις,—“You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing,” say the Chaldean Oracles.—"Walking"
It is with science as with ethics,—we cannot know truth by contrivance and method; the Baconian is as false as any other, and with all the helps of machinery and the arts, the most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more perfect Indian wisdom.—"Natural History of Massachusetts"
It might seem that I had some spite against the priest, but not so, I am on as good terms with him as with another man.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
It would be no reproach to a philosopher, that he knew the future better than the past, or even than the present. It is better worth knowing.—"Thomas Carlyle and His Works"
Knowledge does not come to us by details but by lieferungs from the gods.—Journal, 7 July 1851
Listen to music religiously as if it were the last strain you might hear.—Journal, 12 June 1851
Man flows at once to God as soon as the channel of purity, physical, intellectual, and moral is open.—Journal, 1850
Men invite the devil in at every angle and then prate about the garden of Eden and the fall of man.—Journal, 5 November 1855
Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual.—"Natural History of Massachusetts"
Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer’s requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world.—Walden
