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When I would recreate myself I seek the darkest wood the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a...more

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To be awake is to be alive.

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I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my b...more

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Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

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I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree or a yellow birch or an old acquaintance a...more

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The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

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Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

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The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance o...more

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Every blade in the field - Every leaf in the forest - lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.

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The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient wh...more

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You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer’s wood, or chopping alone in the woods, men...more

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Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits...more

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As the sun went down, I saw a solitary boatman disporting on the smooth lake. The falling dews seemed to strain and purify the air, and I was soothed ...more

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If a man walk 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 whole day as a specu...more

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It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is in the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigour of Na...more