Monday, January 21, 2008

Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it.”

“In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

"Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it."

"I love Nature partly because she is not a man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. Here a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is restraint; she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world; she makes me content with this. None of the joys she supplies is subject to his rules and definitions. What he touches he taints. In thought he moralizes... How infinite and pure the least pleasure of which Nature is basis compared with the congratulations of mankind! The joy which Nature yields is like that afforded by frank words of one we love."

"...a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors..."

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone."

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, I would love to know what writing of his this quote came from - it is beautiful. "I love Nature partly because she is not a man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. Here a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is restraint; she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world; she makes me content with this. None of the joys she supplies is subject to his rules and definitions. What he
touches he taints. In thought he moralizes... How infinite and pure the least pleasure of which Nature is basis compared with the congratulations of mankind! The joy which Nature yields is like that afforded by frank words of one we love."

CC

sharingsunshine said...

I don't know where it came from. It is in a book about the Everglades that included it: The Swamp by Michael Grunwald.

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