Thoreau Wildness Quotes & Sayings

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. — Henry David Thoreau

There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness. — Henry David Thoreau

What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own. — Henry David Thoreau

The most alive is the wildest. — Henry David Thoreau

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. — Henry David Thoreau

Wildness is the preservation of the World. — Henry David Thoreau

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

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. — Henry David Thoreau

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows that surround it. We need the tonic of wildness ... — Henry David Thoreau

Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure. — Henry David Thoreau

As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. — Henry David Thoreau

Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet. — Henry David Thoreau

I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me. — Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau the "Patron Saint of Swamps" because he enjoyed being in them and writing about them said, "my temple is the swamp ... When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most impenetrable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum ... I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place ... far away from human society. What's the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour's walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty. — 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