Maine Woods Thoreau Quotes

#1. Within the memory of many of my townsmen the road near which my house stands resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the woods which border it were notched and dotted here and there with their little gardens and dwellings, though it was then much more shut in by the forest than now. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#2. 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. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#3. Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,
not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,
and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#4. You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer's wood, or chopping alone in the woods, men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a chestnut is of meat; who were out not only in '75 and 1812, but have been out every day of their lives; greater men than Homer, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so; they never took to the way of writing. Look at their fields, and imagine what they might write, if ever they should put pen to paper. Or what have they not written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and harrowing, and plowing, and subsoiling, in and in, and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they had already written for want of parchment. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#5. On the morning of many a first spring day ... the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead. There needs no stronger proof of immortality. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#6. A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#7. Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#8. Sometimes you have to leave the world in order to learn how to live in it. Thoreau shunned society, went to the woods, and came back with a new understanding of life. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#9. I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#10. 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. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#11. That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the country's champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest? #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#12. I wished only to be set down in Canada, and take one honest walk there as I might in Concord woods of an afternoon. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#13. Thoreau went to the woods. I went to the mats. #Quote by Chris Matakas

#14. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#15. They are not callow like the young of most birds, but more perfectly developed and precocious even than chickens. The remarkably adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes is very memorable. All intelligence seems reflected in them. They suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience. Such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coeval with the sky it reflects. The woods do not yield another such a gem. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#16. But, on more accounts than one, I had had enough of moose-hunting. I had not come to the woods for this purpose, nor had I foreseen it, though I had been willing to learn how the Indian manvred; but one moose killed was as good, if not as bad, as a dozen. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#17. The outside is the only place we can truly be inside the world. #Quote by Daniel J. Rice

#18. The trees show definitions of themselves subtly like the face of a man. #Quote by Daniel J. Rice

#19. It is worth the while to detect new faculties in man,
he is so much the more divine; and anything that fairly excites our admiration expands us. The Indian, who can find his way so wonderfully in the woods, possesses an intelligence which the white man does not,
and it increases my own capacity, as well as faith, to observe it. I rejoice to find that intelligence flows in other channels than I knew. It redeems for me portions of what seemed brutish before. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#20. 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. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#21. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#22. I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#23. To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness, and we no longer produce tar and turpentine. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#24. As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period of my life; I mean that I had some. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#25. There, on the far side of of the Atlantic, would be Maine, but despite the shared ocean, her island and this one were worlds apart. Where Inishmaan was gray and brown, its fragile man-made soil supporting only the hardiest of low-growing plants, the fertile Quinnipeague invited tall pines in droves, not to mention vegetables, flowers, and improbable, irrepressible herbs. Lifting her head, eyes closed now, she breathed in the damp Irish air and the bit of wood smoke that drifted on the cold ocean wind. Quinnipeague smelled of wood smoke, too, since early mornings there could be chilly, even in summer. But the wood smoke would clear by noon, giving way to the smell of lavender, balsam, and grass. If the winds were from the west, there would be fry smells from the Chowder House; if from the south, the earthiness of the clam flats; if from the northeast, the purity of sweet salt air. #Quote by Barbara Delinsky

#26. 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 whole day as a spectulator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#27. it is remarkable that the wild apple, which I praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or woods, being brought into the house, has frequently a harsh and crabbed taste. The Saunter-er's Apple not even the saunterer can eat in the house. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#28. The wonderful purity of nature at this season is a most pleasing fact ... In the bare fields and tinkling woods, see what virtue survives. In the coldest and bleakest places, the warmest charities still maintain a foothold. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#29. It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down and turn to mould!
painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living. So they troop to their last resting-place, light and frisky. They put on no weeds, but merrily they go scampering over the earth, selecting the spot, choosing a lot, ordering no iron fence, whispering all through the woods about it,
some choosing the spot where the bodies of men are mouldering beneath, and meeting them half-way. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#30. You must converse much with the field and the woods if you would imbibe such health into your mind and spirit as you covet for your body #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#31. The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#32. He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases led down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that led through invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality that permitted explorations in remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space-time continua. #Quote by H.P. Lovecraft

#33. Then at night the general stillness is more impressive than any sound, but occasionally you hear the note of an owl farther or nearer in the woods, and if near a lake, the semihuman cry of the loons at their unearthly revels. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau