A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Quotes

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“This world is but canvas to our imaginations.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire, because I was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath, instead of a church, when I would have gone farther than he to hear a true word spoken on that or any day. He declared that I was 'breaking the Lord's fourth commandment,' and proceeded to enumerate, in a sepulchral tone, the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary work on the Sabbath. He really thought that a god was on the watch to trip up those men who followed any secular work on this day, and did not see that it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. The country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a village, the church, not only really but from association, is the ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly, such temples as these shall erelong cease to deform the landscape. There are few things more disheartening and disgusting than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the Sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.”
― Henry David Thoreau , A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake. But an unwavering and commanding virtue would compel even its most fantastic and faintest dreams to respect its ever wakeful authority; as we are accustomed to say carelessly, we should never have dreamed of such a thing. Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“Even the utmost good-will and harmony and practical kindness are not sufficient for Friendship, for Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody. We do not wish for Friends to feed and clothe our bodies, -neighbors are kind enough for that, -but to do the like office to our spirits. For this few are rich enough, however well disposed they may be.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with Nature. He has glances of starry recognition to which our saloons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“On Ponkawtasset, since, we took our way,
Down this still stream we took our meadowy way,
A poet wise has settled, whose fine ray
Doth faintly shine on Concord's twilight day.

Like those first stars, whose silver beams on high,
Shining more brightly as the day goes by,
Most travellers cannot at first descry,
But eyes that wont to range the evening sky,

And know celestial lights, do plainly see,
And gladly hail them, numbering two or three;
For lore that's deep must deeply studied be,
As from deep wells men read star-poetry.

These stars are never pal'd, though out of sight,
But like the sun they shine forever bright;
Aye, they are suns, though earth must in its flight
Put out its eyes that it may see their light.

Who would neglect the least celestial sound,
Or faintest light that falls on earthly ground,
If he could know it one day would be found
That star in Cygnus whither we are bound,
And pale our sun with heavenly radiance round?”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“The white man comes, pale as the dawn, with a load of thought, with a slumbering intelligence as a fire raked up, knowing well what he knows, not guessing but calculating; strong in community, yielding obedience to authority; of experienced race; of wonderful, wonderful common sense; dull but capable, slow but persevering, severe but just, of little humor but genuine; a laboring man, despising game and sport; building a house that endures, a framed house. He buys the Indian's moccasins and baskets, then buys his hunting-grounds, and at length forgets where he is buried and plows up his bones.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“This man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have lived. Perchance he is not confounded by many knowledges, and has not sought out many inventions, but how to take many fishes before the sun sets, with slender birchen pole and flaxen line, that is invention enough for him.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“Sure there are poets which did never dream
Upon Parnassus, nor did taste the stream
Of Helicon; we therefore may suppose
Those made not poets, but the poets those.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“As yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of today is present, so some flitting perspectives and demi-experiences of the life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside to time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“Man needs not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“The Common Perch, _Perca flavescens_, which name describes well the gleaming, golden reflections of its scales as it is drawn out of the water, its red gills standing out in vain in the thin element, is one of the handsomest and most regularly formed of our fishes, and at such a moment as this reminds us of the fish in the picture which wished to be restored to its native element until it had grown larger; and indeed most of this species that are caught are not half grown. In the ponds there is a light-colored and slender kind, which swim in shoals of many hundreds in the sunny water, in company with the shiner, averaging not more than six or seven inches in length, while only a few larger specimens are found in the deepest water, which prey upon their weaker brethren. I have often attracted these small perch to the shore at evening, by rippling the water with my fingers, and they may sometimes be caught while attempting to pass inside your hands. It is a tough and heedless fish, biting from impulse, without nibbling, and from impulse refraining to bite, and sculling indifferently past. It rather prefers the clear water and sandy bottoms, though here it has not much choice. It is a true fish, such as the angler loves to put into his basket or hang at the top of his willow twig, in shady afternoons along the banks of the stream. So many unquestionable fishes he counts, and so many shiners, which he counts and then throws away. Old Josselyn in his "New England's Rarities," published in 1672, mentions the Perch or River Partridge.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to a man as his own thoughts”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“Let us not, my friends, be wheedled and cheated into good behavior to earn the salt of our eternal porridge, whoever they are that attempt it. Let us wait a little, and not purchase any clearing here, trusting that richer bottoms will soon be put up. It is but thin soil where we stand; I have felt my roots in a richer ere than this.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers

“is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers