The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861

The astronomer is as blind to the significant phenomena, or the significance of phenomena, as the wood-sawyer who wears glasses to defend his eyes from sawdust. The question is not what you look at, but what you see.

It is wise to write on many subjects, to try many themes, that so you may find the right and inspiring one. Be greedy of occasions to express your thought. Improve the opportunity to draw analogies.

Perchance as we grow old we cease to spring with the spring, and we are indifferent to the succession of years, and they go by without epoch as months. Woe be to us when we cease to form new resolutions on the opening of a new year!

Though I should front an object for a lifetime I should only see what it concerned me to see.

I, too, would fain set down something beside facts. Facts should only be as the frame to my pictures; they should be material to the mythology which I am writing; not facts to assist men to make money, farmers to farm profitably, in any common sense; facts to tell who I am, and where I have been or what I have thought: as now the bell rings for eve

We should not endeavor coolly to analyze our thoughts, but, keeping the pen even and parallel with the current, make an accurate transcript of them. Impulse is, after all, the best linguist, and for his logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, it cannot fail to be most convincing. The nearer we approach to a complete but simple transcript of our tho

Winter, with its inwardness, is upon us. A man is constrained to sit down, and to think.

It matters not whether they visit my mind or yours,—only that it come from heaven. A meteorological journal of the mind. You shall observe what occurs in your latitude, I in mine.

The most positive life that history notices has been a constant retiring out of life, a wiping one’s hands of it, seeing how mean it is, and having nothing to do with it.