Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I've always been fascinated and stared at maps for hours as a kid. I've especially been most intrigued by the uninhabited or lonelier places on the planet. Like Greenland, for instance, or just recently flying over Alaska and a chain of icy, mountainous islands, uninhabited.

Most Americans have no clue that before there were highways, there were only waterways to get through the wilderness. If you weren't on a lake or a river, you were in a jungle.

On and on they flew, over the countryside parceled out in patches of green and brown, over roads and rivers winding through the landscapes like strips of matte and glossy ribbon.

I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.

Switzerland would me a mighty big place if it were ironed flat.

I would stare at maps of Delaware for hours.

I used to live in Canada. It's a beautiful country with a lot of different kind of topographic regions.

I like geography. I like to know where places are.

I had the Big Horn river explored from Wind River mountain to my place of embarkation.

My first occupation was to map the country.

For some reason the most devoted mapheads seem to be kids.

We were just looking at maps.

They were maps that lived, maps that one could study, frown over, and add to; maps, in short, that really meant something.

Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.

I [had] added another small piece to the pages of the atlas that were real to me.

All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as rivers.

Where roads are made I lose my way.In the wide water, in the blue sky there is no line of a track.The pathway is hidden by the birds' wings, by the star-fires, by the flowers of the wayfaring seasons.And I ask my heart if its blood carries the wisdom of the unseen way.

A map is the dead body of where you've been. A map is the unborn baby of where you're going. There are no maps. Maps are pictures of what isn't.

Adam Larey gazed with hard and wondering eyes down the silent current of the red river upon which he meant to drift away into the desert

I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, wherever nature led.

We're right here on this very spot. Besides, being lost is never a matter of not knowing where you are; it's a matter of not knowing where you aren't - and I don't care at all about where I'm not.

The expedition of Messrs. Lewis & Clarke for exploring the river Missouri, & the best communication from that to the Pacific ocean, has had all the success which could have been expected.

On the 31st of August, 1846, I left Concord in Massachusetts for Bangor and the backwoods of Maine,... I proposed to make excursions to Mount Ktaadn, the second highest mountain in New England, about thirty miles distant, and to some of the lakes of the Penobscot, either alone or with such company as I might pick up there.

Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either.