What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more.

Henry David Thoreau
About This Quote

As a child, I spent a lot of time in the woods. The woods are my favorite place, but it is inside my head that they are the most magical. When I am in the woods, my imagination can go anywhere in time or space. For example, I think about being in the woods when I was a little girl and suddenly I am back in my childhood home with my mother and grandmother.

If I am climbing through the forest when I was born, that is also where I think I fell asleep when I was an infant. Sometimes that is all that can be seen. There is no way to tell where the fantasy is until you are there.

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy - Isaac Newton
  2. Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow? - Annie Dillard
  3. When two creatures meet, the one that is able to intimidate its opponent is recognized as socially superior, so that a social decision does not always depend on a fight; an encounter in some circumstances may be enough. - Hediger
  4. There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more - George Gordon Byron
  5. The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean. - Robinson Jeffers
More Quotes By Henry David Thoreau
  1. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed...
  2. I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours..
  3. The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
  4. It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always.
  5. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Related Topics