"Thoreau" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... ask? Well, because Hawthorne had lived there, and because the region was redolent of Emerson and Thoreau, and I am glad to record that upon reaching it of a perfect summer evening, we found the lovely old village all that it had been pictured by the poets. The wide and beautiful meadows, the stone walls, the slow stream, the bridge and the statue ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of the 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 Balfour, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... and frank, like Thoreau. Perhaps, had she exercised it, there was a third gift—the gift of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... segregated in institutions and 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 until there ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of the history of the house, except Thoreau's telling me that it was inhabited a generation or two ago by a man who believed he should never die. [Footnote: This is the first intimation of the story of Septimius Felton, so far as local setting is concerned. The scenery of that romance ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... is that the propaganda of anarchism is generally crude. It is true that much good literature is permeated with the ideals of anarchism, for instance, Shelley, Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson. Such reading is excellent as a means of humanising and making anarchists of refined people, but how could you appeal to the rebellious workers with such books as these? For instance, my father, do you think ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... had read how Thoreau had lived upon corn-meal mush; and he and Corydon resolved to patronize the less expensive foods. The price of meat and eggs and butter in the winter-time was in truth appalling; so they would buy potatoes ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... and talking over verse who never dream of it when at home. I am tempted to mention the poets, and even the other authors who gain a kindly rubric for their work from the gentle company of lake and wood and stream. I should frankly name Walt Whitman and Thoreau, and pause pretty soon in wonder at the small number of poets who suggest out-door life as their source of inspiration. A good many of them—read as you lie in a birch canoe or seated on a stump in the woods—shrink to well-bred, comfortable parlor bards, who seem to you to have gotten their ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... 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 ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... alertness and zest. Where the child's capacity for close observation survives into manhood, supplemented by man's power of sustained attention, we have the typical temperament of the lover of the woods, the mountains, and the wild—of the naturalist in the sense that Thoreau was a naturalist, and many another whose ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... Ruskin had not Thoreau's intimate acquaintance with the details of wild life, but his attitude towards animals and plants was the same; hating the science that murders to dissect; resigning his Professorship at Oxford, finally, because ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... he kicks the dust." Thus pithily wrote Henry Thoreau, the quaint philosopher, in his little shack by the beautiful Walden pool. The truth of this saying was certainly verified in old Billy Fletcher's death, and the people of Glendow were destined to see the dust stirred by his departure, rise ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... 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 wonder and reverence and love we feel in the presence of the inscrutable ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... large number of things of which not even casual mention has been made, but which at the time occupied no small amount of the inventor's time and attention, and many of which are now part and parcel of modern civilization. Edison has, indeed, touched nothing that he did not in some way improve. As Thoreau said: "The laws of the Universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive," and there never was any one more sensitive to the defects of every art and appliance, nor any one more active in applying the law of evolution. It is perhaps this many-sidedness ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... fissures in the boulders yonder seem to sympathise with the gaps in the terrace walls: the cyclamen leaves in the one are salaaming the cyclamen flowers in the other. O, these terraces would have delighted the heart of the American naturalist Thoreau. He could not have desired stone walls with more gaps in them. But mind you, these are not dark, ugly, hollow, hopeless chinks. Behind every one of them lurks a mystery. Far back in the niches I can see the busts of the poets who wrote the poems which these beautiful ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... 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 plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... Trinity test was from an initial list of eight possible test sites. Besides the Jornada, three of the other seven sites were also located in New Mexico: the Tularosa Basin near Alamogordo, the lava beds (now the El Malpais National Monument) south of Grants, and an area southwest of Cuba and north of Thoreau. Other possible sites not located in New Mexico were: an Army training area north of Blythe, California, in the Mojave Desert; San Nicolas Island (one of the Channel Islands) off the coast of Southern California; ...
— Trinity [Atomic Test] Site - The 50th Anniversary of the Atomic Bomb • The National Atomic Museum
... 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the meaning of life. It is something more than the bodily hand that gropes in the darkness and touches God's hand. To commune with a Divine Power, we must transcend the experience of the senses. We are now prepared to understand what a transcendentalist like Thoreau ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... Thoreau, Emerson spared no trouble to himself that his friend's papers might be properly presented to the reading world. He wrote to his publisher, Mr. Fields: "I send all the poems of Thoreau which I think ought to go with the letters. ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... and artistic 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 the instinctive appreciation ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, and at other times mixed the ideals and planned a life of lonely austerity mitigated by periodical lapses. I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem 'Innisfree,' ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... pictorial method. Compared with Wordsworth's mysticism, with Shelley's passionate pantheism, with Byron's romantic gloom in presence of the mountains and the sea, with Keats' joyous re-creation of mythology, with Thoreau's Indian-like approach to the innermost arcana—with a dozen other moods familiar to the modern mind—it seems to us unimaginative. Thomson has been likened, as a colorist, to Rubens; and possibly the glow, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers |
