Henry David Thoreau Earth Quotations

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

Resign yourself to the influence of the earth.

I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves.

I make it my business to extract from Nature what ever nutriment she can furnish me.... I milk the sky and the earth.

We have need to be earth-born as well as heaven-born, gegeneis, as was said of the Titans of old, or in a better sense than they.

Some interests have got a footing on the earth which we have not made sufficient allowance for.

This whole earth in which we inhabit is but a point is space.

Nature is fair in proportion as the youth is pure. The heavens and the earth are one flower ; the earth is the calyx, the heavens the corolla.

Asked whether or not he believed in an afterlife, Thoreau quipped, "One world at a time."

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus.

There is only one path to Heaven. On Earth, we call it Love.

I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest. I lie and relie on the earth.

New earths, new themes expect us.

Sphere Music - Some sounds seem to reverberate along the plain, and then settle to earth again like dust; such are Noise, Discord, Jargon. But such only as spring heavenward, and I may catch from steeples and hilltops in their upward course, which are the more refined parts of the former, are the true sphere music - pure, unmixed music - in which no wail mingles.

The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit; is organic and fluid to the influence of its spirit and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me.

We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.