Poet Quotes

“Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar's atmosphere.”

“We make needless ado about capital punishment,--taking lives, when there is no life to take.”

“If to chaffer and higgle are bad in trade, they are much worse in Love. It demands directness as of an arrow.”

“Are not all finite beings better pleased with motions relative than absolute?”

“The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.”

“We must heap up a great pile of doing, for a small diameter of being.”

“Fire is the most tolerable third party”

“I love the broad margin to my life.”

“It would be worth the while if in each town there were a committee appointed to see that the beauty of the town received no detriment. If we have the largest boulder in the county, then it should not belong to an individual, nor be made into door-steps.”

“The wilderness is near as well as dear to every man. Even the oldest villages are indebted to the border of wild wood which surrounds them, more than to the gardens of men. There is something indescribably inspiriting and beautiful in the aspect of the forest skirting and occasionally jutting into the midst of new towns, which, like the sand-heaps of fresh fox-burrows, have sprung up in their midst. The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.”

“All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity.”

“The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world. It is even a trivial place. The waves forever rolling to the land are too far-travelled and untamable to be familiar. Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squall and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime.”

“I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness.”

“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

“I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known.”

“The theories and speculations of men concern us more than their puny accomplishment. It is with a certain coldness and languor that we loiter about the actual and so-called practical.”

“No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.”

“Fishing has been styled 'a contemplative man's recreation,' ... and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation.”

“I am a citizen of the world first, and of this country at a later and more convenient hour.”

“Trade and commerce, if they were not made of Indian rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way.”

“Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a different season.”

“All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.”

“Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children. Consider the silent influencewhich flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified there.”

“I should have liked to come across a large community of pines, which had never been invaded by the lumbering army.”

“The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.”