Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
— Henry David Thoreau
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
— Henry David Thoreau, journal, 5 January 1856
We need the tonic of wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.
— Henry David Thoreau
Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?
Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself. — Henry David Thoreau
Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself. — Henry David Thoreau
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
—
Henry David Thoreau
A lake is the most beautiful and expressive feature of the landscape. It is the eye of life in which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
—
Henry David Thoreau
