Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Why are we ignoring the oceans? Why does NASA spend in one year what NOAA will spend in 1600 years? Why are we looking up? Why are we afraid of the ocean?

I think I'm one of the most fortunate people in the world. I travel around looking for the best waves and appreciate it every second.

I love just how beautiful Vancouver is. I mean, everywhere you look it's just mountains and ocean.

It's always great to visit Taranaki; it's beautiful, and I've caught some great waves there.

I enjoy being in Toronto - there's lots of energy, lots of neat different neighbourhoods - but Vancouver is still home and always will be. I miss going for walks on the ocean with beautiful mountains.

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.

The Nautilus was piercing the water with its sharp spur, after having accomplished nearly ten thousand leagues in three months and a half, a distance greater than the great circle of the earth. Where were we going now, and what was reserved for the future?

Nature is impersonal, awe-inspiring, elegant, eternal. It's geometrically perfect. It's tiny and gigantic. You can travel far to be in a beautiful natural setting, or you can observe it in your backyard - or, in my case, in the trees lining New York City sidewalks, or in the clouds above skyscrapers.

Down below the broad, roaring waves of the sea break against the deep foundation of the rock. But high above the mountain, the sea, and the peaks of rock the eternal ornamentation blooms silently from the dark depths of the universe.

I've been to Australia once before, and we went to Auckland, New Zealand. We were there for a few days. It was absolutely beautiful, so I'm very excited to go back there.

I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea

The earth itself assures us it is a living entity. Deep below surface one can hear its slow pulse, feel its vibrant rhythm. The great breathing mountains expand and contract. The vast sage desert undulates with almost imperceptible tides like the oceans. From the very beginning, throughout all its cataclysmic upthrusts and deep sea submergences, the planet Earth seems to have maintained an ordered rhythm.

I came to explore the wreck.

Ah, you've come over the water. Powerful wet stuff, ain't it?

The modern airplane creates a new geographical dimension. A navigable ocean of air blankets the whole surface of the globe. There are no distant places any longer: the world is small and the world is one.

The sea isn't a place but a fact, and a mystery.

For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.

It is probable that a greater number of monuments of the skill and industry of man will, in the course of the ages, be collected together in the bed of the ocean than will exist at any other time on the surface of the continents.

The ocean is our life support system. No blue, no green. It's really a miracle that we have got a place that works in our favor.

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.

A fish swims in the ocean, and no matter how far it swims there is no end to the water. A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies there is no end to the air. However the fish and the bird have never left their elements. Thus each of them totally covers its full range, and each of them totally experiences its realm... Know that water is life and air is life. The bird is life and the fish is life. Life must be the bird and life must be the fish... practice, enlightenment and people are like this.

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador a greater wildness than in some recess of Concord.

I love ice, when I was in Antarctica many decades ago, I got to see a lot of ice. And the one thing that impressed me -because I love to talk about ice - is that it has a color.

Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.

You are the mountain, you are the rock You are the cord and you’re the spark You are the eagle, you are the lark You are the world and you’re remarkable You’re the ocean eating the shore You are the calm inside the storm You’re every emotion, you can endure You are the world and the world is yours. ((The World as I See It))