Walking

Author: Henry David Thoreau (1862)

Quotes

If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.

What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man.

In short, all good things are wild and free.

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant.

Live free, child of the mist -- and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist.

Their coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in Autumn.