Naturalist Quotes

“The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact.”

“There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite at our elbows.”

“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.”

“Yet we must try the harder, the less the prospect of success.”

“Every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us.”

“Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.... What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”

“If the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success.”

“Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be.”

“One must maintain a little bittle of summer, even in the middle of winter.”

“This American government - what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.”

“As for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun.”

“Hate can pardon more than love.”

“What the banker sighs for, the meanest clown may have-leisure and a quiet mind.”

“The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show. A companion with whom I was sailing one very windy but bright moonlight night, when the stars were few and faint, thought that a man could get along with them,-though he was considerably reduced in his circumstances,-that they were a kind of bread and cheese that never failed.”

“Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive.”

“For my own part, I commonly attend more to nature than to man, but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent.”

“Man is the artificer of his own happiness.”

“The savage in man is never quite eradicated.”

“Always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary.”

“Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?”

“Oh, one world at a time!”

“Whoever can discern truth has received his commission from a higher source than the chiefest justice in the world who can discernonly law. He finds himself constituted judge of the judge. Strange that it should be necessary to state such simple truths!”

“Why should not we, who have renounced the king's authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be "civilized off the face of the earth," - our forests, not to hold the king's game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation, - not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true re-creation?”

“We need the tonic of wildness.”

“The sun is but a morning star.”