“Communicating with the villas and hills and forests on either hand, by the glances we sent them, or the echoes we awakened.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Go and measure to what length the silvery willows catkins have crept out beyond their scales, if you would know what time o' the year it is by Nature's clock.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“How happens it we reverence the stones which fall from another planet, and not the stones which belong to this—another globe, not this—heaven, and not earth? Are not the stones in Hodge’s wall as good as the aerolite at Mecca? Is not our broad back-door-stone as good as any corner-stone in heaven.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health! The discipline of the schools or of business can never impart such serenity to the mind.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“How much Nature herself suffers from drought! It seems quite as much as she can do to produce these crops.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“I enter a swamp as a sacred place—a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength—the marrow of Nature.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“I have a room all to myself; it is Nature.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There 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 constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“And, above all, there is this difference between resisting this and a purely brute or natural force, that I can resist this with some effect; but I cannot expect, like Orpheus, to change the nature of the rocks and trees and beasts.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“As it is important to consider Nature from the point of view of science remembering nomenclature and system of men, and so, if possible, go a step further in that direction, so it is equally important often to ignore or forget all that men presume they know, and take an original and unprejudiced view of Nature, letting her make what impression she will on you, as the first men, and all children and natural men still do.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. I read in Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground, of the magnolia, and the Florida keys, and their warm sea breezes; of the fence-rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the rice-bird; of the breaking up of winter in Labrador, and the melting of the snow on the forks of the Missouri; and owe an accession of health to these reminiscences of luxuriant nature.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“For the true art is not merely a sublime consolation and holiday labor, which the gods have given to sickly mortals; but such a masterpiece as you may imagine a dweller on the tablelands of central Asia might produce, with threescore and ten years for canvas, and the faculties of a man for tools,—a human life; wherein you might hope to discover more than the freshness of Guido's Aurora, or the mild light of Titian's landscapes,—no bald imitation nor even rival of Nature, but rather the restored original of which she is the reflection.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“For every oak and birch too growing on the hill-top, as well as for these elms and willows, we knew that there was a graceful ethereal and ideal tree making down from the roots, and sometimes Nature in high tide brings her mirror to its foot and makes it visible.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“I make it my business to extract from Nature whatever nutriment she can furnish me though at the risk of endless iteration. I milk the sky and the earth.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“If any part of nature excites our pity, it is for ourselves we grieve, for there is eternal health and beauty. We get only transient and partial glimpses of the beauty of the world.”

~Henry David Thoreau

“If men were to be destroyed and the books they have written were to be transmitted to a new race of creatures, in a new world, what kind of record would be found in them of so remarkable a phenomenon as the rainbow?”

~David Henry Thoreau

“If we did not hear, however, we did listen, not without a reasonable expectation; that at least I have to tell,—only some utterly uncivilized, big-throated owl hooted loud and dismally in the drear and boughy wilderness, plainly not nervous about his solitary life, not afraid to hear the echoes of his voice there.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“In society you will not find health, but in nature.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“In summer it is the earth's liquid eye, a mirror in the breast of nature.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Is Nature so easily tamed? Is she not as primitive and vigorous here as anywhere?”

~David Henry Thoreau

“It is a thorough process, this war with the wilderness—breaking nature, taming the soil, feeding it on oats. The civilized man regards the pine tree as his enemy. He will fell it and let in the light, grub it up and raise wheat or rye there. It is no better than a fungus to him.”

~Henry David Thoreau

“It seems to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“It was ready to echo the growl of a bear, the howl of a wolf, or the scream of a panther; but when you get fairly into the middle of one of these grim forests, you are surprised to find that the larger inhabitants are not at home commonly, but have left only a puny red squirrel to bark at you.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“It was summer, and now again it is winter. Nature loves this rhyme so well that she never tires of repeating it.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Let men tread gently through nature.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Love is the burden of all Nature's odes.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Love never stands still, nor does its object. It is the revolving sun and the swelling bud. If I know what I love, it is because I remember it.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Man's progress through nature should have an accompaniment of music. It relieves the scenery, which is seen through it as a subtler element, like a very clear morning air in autumn.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Marching is when the pulse of the hero beats in unison with the pulse of Nature, and he steps to the measure of the universe; then there is true courage and invincible strength.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Music is the sound of circulation in nature's veins. It is the flux which melts nature.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Nature always adopts the simplest modes which will accomplish her end.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Nature has left nothing to the mercy of man.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Nature is a greater and more perfect art, the art of God.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Nature is beautiful as in repose, not promising a higher beauty to-morrow. Her actions are level to one another, and so are never unfit or inconsistent.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Nature is moderate and loves degrees.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Nature makes no noise. The howling storm, the rustling leaf, the pattering rain are no disturbance, there is an essential and unexplored harmony in them.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Nature never makes haste; her systems revolve at an even pace.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Nature works by contraries. That which in summer was most fluid and unresting is now most solid and motionless.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Nature would not appear so rich, the profusion so rich, if we knew a use for everything.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Once I was part and parcel of Nature—now I am observant of her.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“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.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“The Scarlet Oak asks a clear sky and the brightness of late October days. These bring out its colors.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“There are odors enough in nature to remind you of everything if you had lost every sense but smell.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Thus a man shall lead his life away from here on the edge of the wilderness, in Indian Millinocket stream, in a new world, far in the dark of a continent, and have a flute to play at evening here, while his strains echo to the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live, as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“To us snow and cold seem a mere delaying of the spring. How far we are from understanding the value of these things in the economy of Nature!”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Very few men can speak of Nature with any truth. They confer no favor; they do not speak a good word for her.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“We, too, are out, obeying the same law with all nature. Not less important are the observers of the birds than the birds themselves.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“What is Nature unless there is an eventful human life passing within her?”

~David Henry Thoreau

“When the frogs dream, and the grass waves, and the buttercups toss their heads, and the heat disposes to bathe in the ponds and streams, then is summer begun.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Words should pass between friends as the lightning passes from cloud to cloud.”

~David Henry Thoreau

“Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them,—transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library,—aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.”

~David Henry Thoreau