I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps I have owed to this employment and tohunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance.
Henry David ThoreauOne piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.
Henry David ThoreauA written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.
Henry David ThoreauThe man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.
Henry David ThoreauWhat a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of Ossian, and that of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare and Milton, much more of Dryden, and Pope, and Gray! Our summer of English poetry, like the Greek and Latin before it, seems well advanced towards its fall, and laden with the fruit and foliage of the season, with bright autumnal tints, but soon the winter will scatter its myriad clustering and shading leaves, and leave only a few desolate and fibrous boughs to sustain the snow and rime, and creak in the blasts of age.
Henry David Thoreau