Henry David Thoreau Quotes

What if the leaves were to fall a-weeping, and say, "It will be so painful for us to be pulled from our stalks, when autumn comes?" Foolish fear! Summer goes, and autumn succeeds. The glory of death is upon the leaves; and the gentlest breeze that blows takes them softly and silently from the bough, and they float slowly down, like fiery sparks, upon the moss.

I have come to regard November as the older, harder man's October. I appreciate the early darkness and cooler temperatures. It puts my mind in a different place than October. It is a month for a quieter, slightly more subdued celebration of summer's death as winter tightens its grip.

The leaves had fallen from the trees and lay crisp and crackling beneath his feet. Picking one up he marveled, not for the first time, at the perfection of nature where leaves were most beautiful at the very end of their lives.

We aged a hundred years, and this happened in a single hour: the short summer had already died, the body of the ploughed plains smoked.

October turned my maple's leaves to gold; The most are gone now; here and there one lingers: Soon these will slip from the twigs' weak hold, Like coins between a dying miser's fingers.

There is no better time than the autumn to begin forgetting the things that trouble us, allowing them to fall away like dried leaves. There is no better time to dance again, to make the most of every crumb of sunlight and warm body and soul with its rays before it falls asleep and becomes only a dim light bulb in the skies.

I love the fall. I love it because of the smells that you speak of; and also because things are dying, things that you don't have to take care of anymore, and the grass stops growing.

Through the dripping weeks that follow One another slow, and soak Summer's extinguished fire and autumn's drifting smoke.

What was it Catelyn Stark had called them, that night at Bitterbridge? The knights of summer. And now it was autumn and they were falling like leaves.

Perhaps the wind Wails so in winter for the summers dead, And all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries For what has been and is not.

Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead.

You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing.

Now the peak of summer's past, the sky is overcast And the love we swore would last for an age seems deceit.

The Autumn is old; The sere leaves are flying; He hath gather'd up gold, And now he is dying;- Old age, begin sighing!

When death comes, it's just like winter. We don't say, "There ought not to be winter." That the winter season, when the leaves fall and the snow comes, is some kind of defeat, something which we should hold out against. No. Winter is part of the natural course of events. No winter, no summer. No cold, no heat.

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world.

Peace to these little broken leaves, That strew our common ground; That chase their tails, like silly dogs, As they go round and round. For though in winter boughs are bare, Let us not once forget Their summer glory, when these leaves Caught the great Sun in their strong net; And made him, in the lower air, Tremble - no bigger than a star!

In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy.

Surely 't is better, when summer is over To die when all fair things are fading away.

The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, There is not sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

Around and around the house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow.