HENRY DAVID THOREAU
A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener.
So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts.
We should be blessed if we lived in the present always,
and took advantage of every accident that befell us,
like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it;
and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities.
We loiter in winter while it is already spring.
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.
Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated.
That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique
in our employments and habits of thought.
His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours.
There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament,—the gospel according to this moment.
The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter,
but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy?
When I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself,
"There is one of us well, at any rate,"—
and with a sudden gush return to my senses.
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.
He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton;
he who does not cannot be otherwise.
Every morning is a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity,
and I may say innocence, with nature herself.
To him, whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed in such desperate enterprises?
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?
Men say that a stich in time saves nine,
and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine tomorrow.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music which he hears,
however measured or far away.
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night,
I have been anxious to improve the nick of time,
and notch it on my stick too;
to stand on the meeting of two eternities,
the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment;
to toe that line.
It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak, and another to hear.
Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment.
Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts,
nor even to found a school,
but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates,
a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life,
not only theoretically, but practically.
I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream.
Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?
At a lecture, nor long since, I felt that the lecturer had chosen a theme too foreign to himself,
and so failed to interest me as much as he might have done.
He described things not in or near to his heart, but towards his extremities and superficies.
There was, in this sense, no truly central or centralizing thought in the lecture.
I would have had him deal with his privatest experience, as the poet does.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion.
Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and,
as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue,
and each shows only what lies in its focus.
The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms, the totality of nature.
Nothing is quite beautiful alone; nothing but is beautiful in the whole.
A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace.
The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect,
seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point.
All things with which we deal preach to us.
What is a farm but a mute gospel?
I think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of Concord did not grow out of any ignorance or depreciation of other longitudes or latitudes, but was rather a playful expression of his conviction of the indifferency of all places,
and that the best place for each is where he stands.
He expressed it once in this wise: "I think nothing is to be hoped from you,
if this bit of mould under your feet is not sweeter to you to eat than any other
in this world, or in any other world."
It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him.
From the funeral address for Thoreau.
Every thought is also a prison;
every heaven is also a prison.
But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze.
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could;
some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely.
I opened my eyes and let what would pass through them into the soul.
I saw no more my relation how near and petty to Cambridge or Boston,
I heeded no more what minute or hour our Massachusetts clocks might indicate.
I saw only the noble earth on which I was born, with the great star which warms and enlightens it.
I saw the clouds . . . it was Day, that was all Heaven said.
The pines glittered with their innumerable green needles in the light
and seemed to challenge me to read their riddle.
The drab oak leaves of the last year turned their little somersaults and lay still again.
And the wind bustled high overhead in the forest top.
Our first mistake is the belief that the circumstance gives the joy which we give to circumstance.
Life is an ecstasy.
