Talked, or tried to talk, with R.W.E. (Ralph Waldo Emerson). Lost my time – nay, almost my identity. He, assuming a false opposition where there was no difference of opinion, talked to the wind – told me what I knew – and I lost my time trying to imagine myself somebody else to oppose him.
Henry David Thoreau Quotes
Public opinion is a weak tyrant, compared with our private opinion – what a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates his fate.
How earthy old people become – mouldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earth worms and mole crickets.
There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.
A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be in Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.
When I consider how, after sunset, the stars come out gradually in troops from behind the hills and woods, I confess that I could not have contrived a more curious and inspiring night.
Hardly a man takes a half-hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, “What’s the news?” as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what […]
If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter – we need never read of another. […]
How novel and original must be each new mans view of the universe – for though the world is so old – and so many books have been written – each object appears wholly undescribed to our experience – each field of thought wholly unexplored – The whole world is an America – a New […]
We need some tonic of wildness – to wade somewhere in marshes where the bittern and the meadow hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe… At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be […]
