Thoreau Environment Quotes & Sayings

What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? — Henry David Thoreau

Inexperienced in agriculture, the Pilgrims were also not woodspeople; indeed, they were so incurious about their environment that Bradford felt obliged to comment in his journal when Francis Billington . . . climbed to the top of a tall tree to look around. As Thoreau noted with disgust, the colonists landed at Plymouth on December 16, but it was not until January 8 that one of them went as far away as two miles--and even then the traveler was, again, Francis Billington. — Charles C. Mann

We can never have enough of Nature. — Henry David Thoreau

We need the tonic of wildness and ... nature. — Henry David Thoreau

The outside is the only place we can truly be inside the world. — Daniel J. Rice

Nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow. She seems not to have provided for, but by a thousand contrivances against it. — Henry David Thoreau

The improved means to the unimproved end. — Henry David Thoreau

We need the tonic of wildness ... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. — Henry David Thoreau