Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Discovery is adventure. There is an eagerness, touched at times with tenseness, as man moves ahead into the unknown. Walking the wilderness is indeed like living. The horizon drops away, bringing new sights, sounds, and smells from the earth. When one moves through the forests, his sense of discovery is quickened. Man is back in the environment from which he emerged to build factories, churches, and schools. He is primitive again, matching his wits against the earth and sky. He is free of the restraints of society and free of its safeguards too.

I now walk into the wild.

We were now arrived at the close of our solitary journeyings along the St. Joseph's trail.

I took four years off after 'In the Cut' because I wanted to see who I'd be without work. I even tried being a hermit in the wilderness in New Zealand. I stayed in a warden's hut two-and-a-half hours off the Routeburn Track through the fjords on the South Island. It was early winter, so there was no electricity or running water.

I have gone to the forest.

I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.

Wherever it's good, whatever strange, faraway land, let's go there, let's stay in that place alone.

Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to- morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them.

Leave the beaten track behind occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do you will be certain to find something you have never seen before.

The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.

Only the road and the dawn, the sun, the wind, and the rain, And the watch fire under stars, and sleep, and the road again.

But I think there's something wonderful and extraordinary about climbing on your own and just that kind of relationship to the environment. I'm very addicted to the mountains. You know, so, I do like that solitude.

I just want pieces of the world.

What an enthusiastic devotion is that which sends a man from the attractions of home, the ties of neighbourhood, the bonds of country, to range plains, valleys, hills, mountains, for a new flower.

Hiking in undiscovered places is a lot of fun.

We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

You can't separate the people from the places - although I sometimes like traveling in places where there are no people.

The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.

My favourite thing is to go where I've never been.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

No phone. No pool. No pets. No cigarettes. Ultimate freedom... No longer to be poisoned by civilization, he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become Lost in the Wild.

If someone said, 'Think of a happy place for you,' I'd say a glacial plane near the South Pole, the wind howling, nobody in sight, a shack with a pot-belly stove and some tea.