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LOVE and FRIENDSHIP
I thought that the sun of our love should have risen as noiselessly as the sun out of the sea, and we sailors have found ourselves steering between the tropics as if the broad day had lasted forever. [proposal to Ellen Sewall Nov ‘40]
I have always loved her. [of Ellen Sewall, to Sophia in his death bed]
The one who came farthest to my lodge…was a poet. … nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. [W Winter] – of Ellery Channing
LIFE
It is a great art to saunter. [J ‘41]
It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once.
I love a broad margin to my life. [W Sounds 91-92; long quote]
…I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly… [W Ponds]
I have traveled a good deal in Concord. [W Economy]
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. [W Economy]
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. [W Where... p. 74 long quote]
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. [W Solitude]
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. [W Economy]
…the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life with is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. [W Economy]
Men have become the tool of their tools.
Our life is frittered away by detail. [W Where]
Where is the division of labor to end, and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me. [W Economy]
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. … The head monkey in Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkey’s in America do the same. [W Economy]
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have noting important to communicate. [W Economy]
This spending the of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. [W Economy]
It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. [ ]
…work---work---work---! Whether a man spends his day in an ecstasy or despondency, he must do some work to show for it… Make your failures tragical by the earnestness and steadfastness of your endeavor. [letter to Blake]
I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. [W Where]
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music her hears, however measured or far away. [W Conclusion]
Love your life, poor as it is. [W Conclusion]
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. [W Conclusion]
ETHICS/RELIGION
Have the gods sent us into this world…to do chores, hold horses, and the like, and not given us any spending money? [ ]
What good I do, in the common sense of that word, must be aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly unintended. [W Economy]
As for Doing Good…I have tried it fairly,…and am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. …to him who does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life, I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will. [ ]
I wish so to live ever as to derive my satisfaction and inspiration from the commonest events…and I may dream of no heaven but that which lies about me. [J]
I found in myself…an instinct toward a higher, or as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.” [W Higher]
No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. … The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched. [W Higher]
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks…. We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. [W Where]
In wildness is the preservation of the world…. All good things are wild and free. … I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. … So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly that even he has down, shall perchance shine into our mends and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light… [The Wild/Walking ‘51]
Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. [Walking ‘51]
As if individual spectators were to be allowed to export the clouds out of the sky or the stars out of the firmament… We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment. [ ]
…since I was born to be a pantheist---if that be the name of me, and I do the deeds of one. [letter to Greeley]
In the fields lights and shadows are my diet. How all trees tell of the sun… Nothing is so beautiful as the tree tops… I would wither and dry up if it were not for lakes and rivers… invigorated by the cones and needles of the pine seen against the frosty air.
To his Aunt Louisa, who asked if he had made his peace with God, “I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt.”
To Parker Pillsbury’s “I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.” Thoreau replied, “One world at a time.”
SOCIAL
We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man….I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds…, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again. [ Where]
We should be men first and subjects afterward. [CD ‘49]
It is his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. [A plea.. ‘59]
It is not a man’s duty…to devote himself to the eradication of…even the most enormous wrong….but it is his duty…not to give it practically his support. [CD ‘49]
The whole enterprise of this nation…there is nothing in which one should lay down his life for, nor even his gloves…they may go their way to their manifest destiny which I trust is not mine. [J]
I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. ….since ….the principal object is not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably that the corporations may be enriched. [W Economy]
NATURE/SCIENCE
The same law that shapes the earth-star shapes the snow star. [J ‘56]
There is no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation to be significant must be subjective. The sum of what the writer has to report is simply some human experience… The man of most science is the man most alive. [J ‘54]
There is nothing inorganic. The earth is not, then, a mere fragment of dead history, strata upon strata like the leaves of a book, an object for a museum…but living poetry, like the leaves of a tree, -- not a fossil earth, but a living specimen. [J]
Who shall distinguish between the law by which a brook finds its river, the instinct by which a bird performs its migrations, and the knowledge by which a man steers his ship around the globe? … The earth is pregnant with law. [J ‘54]
The development theory [Darwin’s] implies a greater force in nature, because it is more flexible and accommodating. And equivalent to a sort of constant new creation.
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