Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

Henry David Thoreau

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

Henry David Thoreau

Nature spontaneously keeps us well. Do not resist her!

Henry David Thoreau

He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.

Henry David Thoreau

I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home.

Henry David Thoreau

I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me.

Henry David Thoreau

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild, and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World

Henry David Thoreau

It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination

Henry David Thoreau

The birds I heard today, which, fortunately, did not come within the scope of my science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation.

Henry David Thoreau

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

Henry David Thoreau

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately...

Henry David Thoreau

To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

Henry David Thoreau

My profession is to always find God in nature.

Henry David Thoreau

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,--not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!

Henry David Thoreau

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

Henry David Thoreau

Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.

Henry David Thoreau

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Henry David Thoreau

You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.

Henry David Thoreau

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

Henry David Thoreau

The voice of nature is always encouraging.

Henry David Thoreau

I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.

Matsuo Basho

Calm and serene The sound of a cicada Penetrates the rock.

Matsuo Basho

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

Mary Webb

No accident of environment or circumstance need cut us off from nature. ... It does not matter how shut in we are. Opportunity for wide experience is of small acccount in this as in other things; it is depth that brings understanding and life.

Mary Webb

Who can say which is the greater sign of creative power, the sun with its planet system swinging with governed impetus to some incalculable end, or the gold sallow catkin with its flashing system of little flies?

Mary Webb

Nature's music is never over; her silences are pauses, not conclusions.

Mary Webb

The love of nature is a passion for those in whom it once lodges. It can never be quenched. It cannot change. It is a furious, burning, physical greed, as well as a state of mystical exaltation. It will have its own.

Philip Warren Anderson

Feynman's cryptic remark, "no one is that much smarter ...," to me, implies something Feynman kept emphasizing: that the key to his achievements was not anything "magical" but the right attitude, the focus on nature's reality, the focus on asking the right questions, the willingness to try (and to discard) unconventional answers, the sensitive ear for phoniness, self-deception, bombast, and conventional but unproven assumptions.

Leonardo da Vinci

Water is the driving force of all nature.

Lisa Kleypas

Nature had squandered an unreasonable quantity of male beauty on this undeserving creature.

John Updike

Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs — To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind.

John Stuart Mill

What is contrary to women's nature to do, they never will be made to do by simply giving their nature free play.

John Stuart Mill

Whether moral and social phenomena are really exceptions to the general certainty and uniformity of the course of nature; and how far the methods, by which so many of the laws of the physical world have been numbered among truths irrevocably acquired and universally assented to, can be made instrumental to the gradual formation of a similar body of received doctrine in moral and political science.