"Thoreau" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never ready for instant use. In literature she knew Shakespeare, Balzac, Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Longfellow, but if you had asked her to place Homer, Schiller, Dante, Victor Hugo, James Fenimore Cooper, or Thoreau she couldn't have done it ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... these things that he loved. Even here, however, he is at times almost impossibly impersonal, so that you feel in a certain description that there is no man between you and the thing described, but that, to adapt a phrase of Thoreau, it is the hills and the sea and the atmosphere writing. This impersonality persists even in "The Aran Islands," so large a part of which is very personal in that it is a statement of his daily life on Inishmaan. It is not, however, from the impersonal writing that I would quote,—though ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers." —THOREAU. ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears." THOREAU ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... and character seemed agreeable indeed, but nothing out of the ordinary; my tacit presumption was that other children as well as I could if they would walk hand in hand with Emerson along the village street, seek in the meadows for arrow-heads with Thoreau, watch Powers thump the brown clay of the "Greek Slave," or listen to the voice of Charlotte Cushman, which could sway assembled thousands, modulate itself to tell stories to the urchin who leaned, rapt, against her knees. Were human felicity so omnipresent as a happy child imagines ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... choicer spirits of our time have known it, has distinctly a religious value. It does not come to a man or a woman who is wholly absorbed in selfish or worldly or material ends. Except ye become in a measure as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of Nature—as Audubon entered it, as Thoreau entered it, as Bryant and Amiel entered it, and as all those enter it who make it a resource in their lives and an instrument of their culture. The forms and creeds of religion change, but the sentiment of religion—the ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... these things take place in the "upper stories," as Thoreau says, but they are none the less audible, and one is tempted to believe that bird voices are on a scale to which the untrained ear is not attuned. Once learn to hear, and nature is full of life and interest. The ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... effort to make Thoreau better known in England had one result that I am pleased to think of. It brought me into personal association with R. L. Stevenson, who had written and published in The Cornhill Magazine an essay on ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... books—or anything else, for that matter. It does chance that her taste is mine in very many cases; but you underrate our protege when you speak of her as ignorant and uncultured. She knows a good deal more about some things than either of us. It is her fund of nature lore that makes Thoreau and White of Selborne appeal to her. Now I love them because I know so little ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... revelled in them, thus becoming epicures at once. It seemed as if all our lives we had been seeking something really recherche, and had just found it. They were as great a revelation to the palate as Bettine or Thoreau might be to the mind. Now all was couleur de rose. Here was found, if not the philosopher's stone, the philosopher's bread, that should turn everything into health. Henceforth the strong heroes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... prison. He may desert a lecture for the saloon in the interests of his own comfort. He may find the livery stable more congenial than the drawing-room. His body may experience a sort of freedom while his mind and spirit are held fast in the shackles of ignorance. A Burroughs, an Edison, a Thoreau, might have his feet in the stocks and still have more freedom than such a man as this. He walks about amid historic scenes with his spiritual eyes blindfolded, and that condition of mind ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... conjure with..... after it has been lost to them and they have turned middle-aged. And so well did we conjure, that Romance came and for an hour led us far from the man-city and its snarling roar. Bardwell, in a way, started it by quoting from Thoreau; but it was old Trefethan, bald-headed and dewlapped, who took up the quotation and for the hour to come was romance incarnate. At first we wondered how many Scotches he had consumed since dinner, but very soon all that ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... poets and sing all summer," says Thoreau. "They are the true singers. Any man can write verses in the love season. We are most interested in those birds that sing for the love of music, and not of their mates; who meditate their strains and amuse themselves with ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various
... 23 m. NW. of Boston; was the residence of Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne; here the first engagement took place in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... read through these, I was somewhat surprised at the omission of all reference to books which I know marked most striking periods in Narcissus' spiritual life: Sartor Resartus, Thoreau's Walden, for example, Mr. Pater's Marius the Epicurean, and Browning's Dramatis Personae. As I reflected, however, I came to the conclusion that such omission was but justice to his own individuality, for none of these books had created an initiative in ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... would like to know something of Thoreau's life, Blue Bonnet. Mr. Stevenson gives a fair glimpse of him. At least he does not spare his eccentricities. We view him ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... to make a book on Emancipators of the Human Mind—Emerson, Jefferson, Thoreau, Tom Paine, Newton, Arnold, Voltaire, Goethe.... When I reflect how few writings connected with the wide open spaces of the West and Southwest are wide enough to enter into such a volume, I realize acutely how desirable is perspective ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... altogether admirable and shining family which Thoreau dreamed he saw in the upper chambers of Spaulding's woods, which Spaulding did not know lived there, and which were not put out when Spaulding, whistling, drove his team through their lower halls. They did not go into society in the village; they were quite well; they had ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... number of the leading writers of this country and of Great Britain. In their catalogue we find the names of Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Holmes, Aldrich, Agassiz, Beecher, Alice Gary, Cummins, Dana, Emerson, Hawthorne, Gail Hamilton, Lowell, Parton, Saxe, Sprague, Stowe, Bayard Taylor, Thoreau, and Tuckerman, in American literature; and in English literature, the names of Browning, Dickens, George Eliot, Mrs. Jameson, Kingsley, Owen Meredith, Charles Reade, and Tennyson. With their English authors they maintain ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... impressions—fond of operatic and other good music, and discerning in works of art. As to either praise or blame of what he writes, he is totally indifferent, not to say scornful—having in fact a very decisive opinion of his own concerning its calibre and destinies. Thoreau, a very congenial spirit, said of Whitman, "He is Democracy;" and again, "After all, he suggests something a little more than human." Lincoln broke out into the exclamation, "Well, he looks like a man!" Whitman responded to ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... Lowell, and Whittier, and Emerson have written enough of poetic melody, the direct inspiration of the feathered inhabitants of the woods, to fill a good-sized volume. In prose, no one has said finer things than Thoreau, who probed nature with a deeper ken than any of his contemporaries. He is to be ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [June, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... spare, for the places of interest are widely scattered. My companion and I went first to Walden Pond, then to the Emerson and Hawthorne houses, then to that ideal burying-place, Sleepy Hollow, where Emerson and Hawthorne and Thoreau rest side by side, and ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... resources, as well as endurance. A man who comes to do battle against these great trees must necessarily be of quite a different character from one who expects, as the California pioneer did, to pick up his fortune in the dust at his feet. I am often reminded of Thoreau's experience in the Maine woods. He says, "The deeper you penetrate into the woods, the more intelligent, and, in one sense, less countrified, do you find the inhabitants; for always the pioneer has been a traveller, and to some extent a man of the world; and, as the distances with which he ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... the defacement of the virginal scene by an unlovely dwelling—the, imposition of a scar on the unspotted landscape? None, save that the arrogant intruder needed shelter, and that he was neither a Diogenes to be content in a tub nor a Thoreau to find in boards an endurable temporary substitute ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... stout boots and coarse frocks and go a-fishing; but Saratoga never "lets up,"—if I may be pardoned the phrase. Consequently you see much of crinoline and little of character. You have to get at the human nature just as Thoreau used to get at bird-nature and fish-nature and turtle-nature, by sitting perfectly still in one place and waiting patiently till it comes out. You see more of the reality of people in a single day's tramp than in twenty days of guarded monotone. Now I cannot conceive of any reason why ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... forty-five feet long, height and width proportionate, with ancient, dead-looking portraits of queens, kings, Straffords and principalities, etc., really the uncomfortablest acme of luxurious comfort that any Diogenes was set into in these late years." Thoreau's furniture at Walden consisted of a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter, a pair of tongs, a kettle, a frying-pan, a wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... spent itself, she put up her hand to push away the object—but grasped it instead. It was a book; opening her tear-wet reddened eyes Blue Bonnet saw that it was a volume of her grandmother's favorite Thoreau. It lay just where Mrs. Clyde had dropped it the day before when she had sprung up at ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... Hector Saint-John," when the "Hector" of his title-pages and American biographers was only a prenom de faintaisie? We owe some concessions to the author of so charming a book, to the eighteenth- century Thoreau. His life is certainly more interesting than the real Thoreau's—and would be, even if it did not present many contradictions. Our records of that life are in the highest degree inexact; he himself is wanting in accuracy as to the date ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... scheme was to let the children read whatever they pleased, and in his brown library Carol absorbed Balzac and Rabelais and Thoreau and Max Muller. He gravely taught them the letters on the backs of the encyclopedias, and when polite visitors asked about the mental progress of the "little ones," they were horrified to hear the children earnestly repeating ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... real books, it is necessary again to distinguish between articulate productions of two classes—between such a work, for example, as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and such an one as Thoreau's Walden, or between Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Sir Thomas Browne's Urn-Burial. The present is an enterprise directed toward the indication to collectors of different views and tastes of the volumes which they should ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song sparrow, and the redwing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell!—THOREAU. ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... when the Mexican War was being fought, an American named Henry D. Thoreau refused to pay his war tax. He did not believe in the war and he refused to support the Government that prosecuted the war. So they put Thoreau in jail. Later he ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... transcendentalists; it extended to all the young writers within reach, who struck their roots deeper into the soil that it had loosened and freshened. We owe to it, in great measure, not merely Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau, but Hawthorne, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... will want to hear. The pine is your school-master, and you are the royal pupil,—Roger Ascham and Queen Elizabeth. It is no longer an ordinary tree, but something born with a spirit in it; and it has birthdays. Thoreau, the man who loved Nature so much that the birds and the fishes took care of him and were never afraid of their master, used to visit certain trees on certain days in the year. The pine has a birthday worth celebrating in December, the maple in October, ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... colonies. The individual with the highest native endowments, the genius, and the talented enjoy or suffer from a more subtle type of isolation from their fellows, that is, the isolation of eminence. "The reason of isolation," says Thoreau, a lover of solitude, "is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar; and when we soar, the company grows thinner and thinner ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Which Thoreau called the 'color of colors,' in the Hebrew signified to have dominion, and in early art was symbolical or emblematic of Divine love, creative power, etc. The word Adam, we have been taught, signifies red man; it does mean 'the blood,' which, of course, originated 'to be red,' as a secondary ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Walt Whitman as poet and person (a subject to which he returned in 1896 with his Whitman: a Study), he began in 1871, with Wake-Robin, a series of books on birds, flowers and rural scenes which has made him the successor of Thoreau as a popular essayist en the plants and animals environing human life. His later writings showed a more philosophic mood and a greater disposition towards literary or meditative allusion than their predecessors, but the general theme and method remained the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... we struck the Marlborough pike, which, round and hard and white, held squarely to the east and was visible a mile ahead. Its friction brought up the temperature amazingly and spurred the pedestrians into their best time. As I trudged along, Thoreau's lines came ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... relic or literary curiosity. We learn with pleasure that this is the first of a series of the Holy Books of every nation, to embrace translations of the Vedas, the Zend-Avesta, the Edda, and many others. Thoreau suggested many years ago—we think in Walden—that such a collection should be published together for the world's use, and we rejoice ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... this castle were as attainable as that of Thoreau!—which was to consist of but one room, with one door to enter it, and where "some should live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a window, and some on settles,—some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... 157 Thoreau lived for two years in a small hut which he built for himself in a wood near Concord, in New England. This extract is from the account he wrote of his ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... World William Drummond Nature Jones Very Compensation Celia Thaxter The Last Hour Ethel Clifford Nature Henry David Thoreau Song of Nature Ralph Waldo Emerson "Great Nature is an Army Gay" Richard Watson Gilder To Mother Nature Frederic Lawrence Knowles Quiet Work Matthew Arnold Nature Henry Wadsworth Longfellow "As an Old Mercer" Mahlon Leonard Fisher Good Company Karle Wilson Baker "Here is the Place where ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... John Brown was another thunderclap. And Abigail showed me what was being said about it. A certain Henry Thoreau, a strange, radical soul living in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, had compared John Brown to Christ. "Some eighteen hundred years ago," Thoreau said, "Christ was crucified; this morning perchance Captain ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... literature in America," said Philip, "after a man rises three inches above the newspaper level? Nobody reads Thoreau; only an insignificant fraction read Emerson, or even Hawthorne. The majority of people have hardly even heard their names. What inducement has a writer? Nobody has any weight in America who is not in Congress, and nobody gets into Congress without the necessity of bribing or button-holing ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... five dollars from her five cents. Another made candy and sold it. A little boy had a peanut stand, and one little fellow earned his money by "going without things." Could not older people follow his example? It suggests Thoreau's epigram, "Your wealth is measured by the number of things you can go without;" or, better yet, Paul's magnificent words, "poor, yet making many rich." This little fellow has hit upon the real principle of success, whether the life is spent in a field of active missionary work, or in "doing without ...
— American Missionary, Vol. 45, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... concern is with the impact of this cosmopolitan current upon the mind and character of a few New England writers. Channing and Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller and Alcott, Thoreau and Emerson, are all representative of the best thought and the noblest ethical impulses of their generation. Let us choose first the greatest name: a sunward-gazing spirit, and, it may be, one of ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... matter drawn from your own experience. (e) J.S. Mill, Inaugural Address at St. Andrew's, in "Dissertations," Vol. IV: Mill's main contentions as to the exact purpose and value of the study of language and literature in universities. (f) H.D. Thoreau, Reading, in "Walden:" The author's views in regard to reading not done in connection with school work. (g) A.G. Balfour, Pleasures of Reading, in "Essays and Addresses" (written as a reply to Harrison's claims, page 97): The main points at issue between Harrison and ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... simple and frank, like Thoreau. Perhaps, had she exercised it, there was a third gift—the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... under the maples beside the stone walls: usually he slept in the cart in the midst of the assortment of goods that proclaimed him, to the astute, an expert in applied psychology. At first you might have thought Silos merely a peddler, but if you knew your Thoreau you would presently begin to perceive that peddling was the paltry price he paid for liberty. Silos was in a way a sage—but such a human sage! He never intruded with theories, he never even hinted at the folly of the mortals who bought or despised ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... other day," so Thoreau tells us, "on Spaulding's farm. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and ...
— Life's Enthusiasms • David Starr Jordan
... tinted richness Mrs. Rambaud's simple gray silk, the collar of which came almost to her ears, was disturbing—almost reproving—but Mrs. Rambaud's ladylike courtesy and generosity made everything all right. She came out of intellectual New England—the Emerson-Thoreau-Channing Phillips school of philosophy—and was broadly tolerant. As a matter of fact, she liked Aileen and all the Orient richness she represented. "Such a sweet little house this is," she said, smilingly. "We've ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... afterwards the 'Princess Rebecca'; the massacre of three hundred and fifty men, women and children of the infant colony of Virginia, a hundred stories of massacre. Or, that story of the mother's revenge, told, I believe, by Thoreau. Her name was Hannah Dunstan. Her house was attacked by Indians; her husband and her elder children fled for their lives; she, with an infant of a fortnight, and her nurse, were left behind. The Indians dashed out the brains of the baby ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... is that the collection is formed on certain general principles, as any similar collection of the sort must be. This series is called "The Best of the World's Classics," and "classics" is used not in the narrow and technical sense, but rather in that of Thoreau, who defined classics as "the noblest recorded thoughts of mankind." Therefore, the first principle of guidance in selection is to take examples of the great writings which have moved and influenced the thought of the world, and which have preeminently the quality of "high ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... numbers of turtles are taken annually, which produce the best quality of tortoise-shell. It is strange that the habits of these creatures down here in the Caribbean Sea should so closely resemble those of the tiny tortoises described by Thoreau as frequenting Walden Pond. The female turtle digs the hole in which to deposit her eggs on the sandy beach, just above the margin of high tide, generally choosing a moonlight night for the purpose. ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... having conquered bodily desire and the inclination of my mind towards women and love, I should live as Thoreau ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... than this gentle, serene, wise man whose friendship for her family was so practical in its expression. Also at that period, which Louisa herself in her diary calls the "sentimental period," she was strongly influenced by the poet and naturalist, Thoreau. From him she learned to know Nature in a closer and more loving intimacy. Thoreau was called a hermit, and known as a genius, and more often than not he could be found in his hut in the woods, or on ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... wood? or has that compact little body force and courage to brave the night and the upper air, and so achieve leagues at one pull? And yonder Bluebird, with the hue of the Bermuda sky upon his back, as Thoreau would say, and the flush of its dawn upon his breast,—did he come down out of heaven on that bright March morning when he told us so softly and plaintively, that, if we pleased, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... stand being told that we don't know how to speak English in England." Something, however, must be pardoned to a foreigner. If Sir Robert would not consent to set Emerson a little higher than the angels, as some other Bostonians could have wished, and had never so much as heard of Thoreau and other American celebrities not wholly insignificant, he had an immense admiration for Longfellow, and could spout "Hiawatha" or "Evangeline" with the best, associated Hawthorne with something besides his own hedges in the month of May, and was eager to be taken out to Beverly Farms, that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... if you take the other view, condemns the sentence as unwise and inhumane. We are not then of the 'same mind that was in Christ.' We disagree with Christ. Either Christ meant nothing, or else he or we must be in the wrong. Well says Thoreau, speaking of some texts from the New Testament, and finding a strange echo of another style which the reader may recognise: 'Let but one of these sentences be rightly read from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... conception of an active participation in the difficult business of statecraft. She is thinking of alliances, of throwing her weight and influence upon the side of law and security. No longer a political Thoreau in the woods, a sort of vegetarian recluse among nations, a being of negative virtues and unpremeditated superiorities, she girds herself for a manly part in the ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... the names of our three most prominent literary naturalists,—Gilbert White, of England, and Thoreau and John Burroughs, of America,—men who have been so en rapport with nature that, while ostensibly only disclosing the charms of their mistress, they have at the same time subtly communicated much of their own wide knowledge of nature, and permanently enriched ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... that a logical mind reared in such an environment should have espoused the principle of non-killing. In his western education Gandhi became acquainted with The Sermon on the Mount, and the writings of Tolstoy and Thoreau, but he tells us himself that he was attracted to these philosophies because they expressed ideas in ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin
... centuries later came Thoreau, the very prince of explorers, for he can take one over well trodden ways and through familiar fields and show him India and the Arctic regions. Patagonia and Panama in one sweeping glance along a ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... Dr. E. A. Mearns, surgeon in the regular army, can scarcely fail to recognize in him the genial sportsman for whom the birds were "always in season." There are others to whom I am indebted, like John Burroughs, Thoreau, Baird, Brewer, and Ridgway, true lovers and interpreters of Nature. Those living stand near her queenly presence; those who have passed on are doubtless ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... sketch, Henry David Thoreau, who lived from 1817 to 1862, was one of the oddest of American men of genius. He was educated at Harvard University, but he did not care, in the common phrase, to "turn his learning to practical account;" that is, save for a short time when he taught ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the coastguards and a lot of the village people quite well. I do like coastguards. They seem to know everything you want to hear about. Miss Sandal used to read to us out of poetry books, and about a chap called Thoreau, who could tickle fish, and they liked it, and let him. She was kind, but rather like her house—there was something bare and bald about her inside mind, I believe. She was very, very calm, and said that people who lost their tempers were not living the higher life. But ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit |
