Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Nature
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By one bait or another, Nature allures inhabitants into all her recesses.
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Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
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In all her products, Nature only develops her simplest germs. One would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create birds. The hawk which now takes his flight over the top of the wood was at first, perchance, only a leaf which fluttered in its aisles. From rustling leaves she came in the course of ages to the loftier flight and clear carol of the bird.
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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!
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We could not help contrasting the equanimity of Nature with the bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume alwaysa crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending.
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I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home.
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The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, would be good for me, too.
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Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
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Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but findher our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds.
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The next day the Indian told me their name for this light,--artoosoq',--and on my inquiring concerning the will-o'-the-wisp, and the like phenomena, he said that his "folks" sometimes saw fires passing along at various heights, even as high as the trees, and making a noise. I was prepared after this to hear of the most startling and unimagined phenomena, witnessed by "his folks"; they are abroad at all hours and seasons in scenes so unfrequented by white men. Nature must have made a thousand revelations to them which are still secrets to us.
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The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.
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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
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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.
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The young pines springing up in the corn-fields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact.
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A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man,--a denizen of the woods. "The pale white man!" I do not wonder that the African pitied him.
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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.
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The indescribable innocence of and beneficence of Nature,-of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,-such health, such cheer, they afford forever!
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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.
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Commerce is really as interesting as nature.
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In the production of the necessaries of life Nature is ready enough to assist man.
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How meanly and grossly do we deal with nature!
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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.
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In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round,--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature.
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Nature spontaneously keeps us well. Do not resist her!
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Nature is slow, but sure; she works no faster than need be; she is the tortoise that wins the race by her perseverance.
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Nature is an admirable schoolmistress.
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I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.
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For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world, into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the cause-way to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.
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In the wildest nature, there is not only the material of the most cultivated life, and a sort of anticipation of the last result,but a greater refinement already than is ever attained by man.... Nature is prepared to welcome into her scenery the finest work of human art, for she is herself an art so cunning that the artist never appears in his work.
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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.
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