Henry David Thoreau Hunting Quotations

For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle. What a coarse and imperfect use Indiansand hunters make of nature! No wonder that their race is so soon exterminated.

I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps I have owed to this employment and tohunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance.

As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day.

But, on more accounts than one, I had had enough of moose-hunting. I had not come to the woods for this purpose, nor had I foreseen it, though I had been willing to learn how the Indian manvred; but one moose killed was as good, if not as bad, as a dozen.

Even in civilized communities, the embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development.

As for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun.

In some countries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight. Such a one might make a good shepherd's dog, but is far from being the Good Shepherd.

We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.

When some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered yes-- remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education-- make them hunters.

I already, and for weeks afterward, felt my nature the coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was reminded that ourlife should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower.