mercredi 24 août 2011

Trouble


« Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. »

Thoreau, Henry David. « Walden: Conclusion » The Portable Thoreau. 1854. p. 567

Compared


« Some are dinning in our ears that we are Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the best pygmy he can? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. »

Thoreau, Henry David. « Walden: Conclusion » The Portable Thoreau. 1854. p. 564

Inward


« Direct your eye right inward, and you’ll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography. »

Thoreau, Henry David. « Walden: Conclusion » The Portable Thoreau. 1854. p. 559

Question


« After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what – how – when – where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight. »

Thoreau, Henry David. « Walden: The Pond in Winter » The Portable Thoreau. 1854. p. 524

dimanche 21 août 2011

Humane


« There is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race, when the hunters are the “best men,” as the Algonquins called them. We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected. This was my answer in respect to those youths who were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they would soon outgrow it. No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature, which holds its life by the same tenure as he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the phil-anthropic distinctions. »

Thoreau, Henry David. « Walden: Higher Laws » The Portable Thoreau. 1854. p. 459

Involved


« With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a same sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as we are concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbours and friends sometimes. »

Thoreau, Henry David. « Walden: Solitude » The Portable Thoreau. 1854. p. 385-386

Universal lyre


« At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pines needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood, the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph. »

Thoreau, Henry David. « Walden: Sounds » The Portable Thoreau. 1854. p. 374-375