"Show me two villages, one embowered in..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau
Show me two villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the other a merely trivial and treelesswaste, or with only a single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate drinkers.
More by Henry David Thoreau
“Say, Not so, and you will out circle the philosophers.”
“It is but too easy to establish another durable and harmonious routine. Immediately all parts of nature consent to it. Only make something to take the place of something, and men will behave as if it was the very thing they wanted.”
“Some poems are for holidays only. They are polished and sweet, but it is the sweetness of sugar, and not such as toil gives to sour bread. The breath with which the poet utters his verse must be that by which he lives.”
More on Nature
“Solitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods!”
“To every one [Nature] appears in a form of his own. She hides herself in a thousand names and terms, and is always the same.”
“A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.”
More on Environment
“Positive thinking can be contagious. Being surrounded by winners helps you develop into a winner.”
“When you look at Earth from that one picture, the one from space, it's really a rather attractive thing. I have nothing against the planet per se. I root for the big comet or asteroid as a way of cleansing the planet. The comet or asteroid 65 million years ago is probably what gave us our opening to replace the reptiles. The greatest entertainment I have in my life is chronicling internally, not necessarily for the public, the slow dissolution of order.”
“The environment is everything that isn't me.”