Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

I have a room all to myself; it is nature.

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.

Johannes Tauler

In the most intimate, hidden and innermost ground of the soul, God is always essentially, actively, and substantially present. Here the soul possesses everything by grace which God possesses by nature.

Johannes Kepler

Nature uses as little as possible of anything.

John Adams

All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.

Jacob Bronowski

Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.

All those midriff-baring pieces have taken on a tacky nature. A slip is the new pristine version of sexiness.

Eric Hoffer

Nature attains perfection, but man never does.

Eric Hoffer

Nature has no compassion. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.

Eric Hoffer

The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flowby the tilt of the social landscape.

Eric Hoffer

Man was nature's mistake she neglected to finish him and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.

Eric Hoffer

Man's chief goal in life is still to become and stay human, and defend his achievements against the encroachment of nature.

Eric Hoffer

Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines.