audible to all men, at all times, in all places

Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself.

If the soul attends for a moment to its own infinity, then and there is silence.

She is audible to all men, at all times, in all places, 

and if we will we may always hearken to her admonitions.

~ Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

from Thoreau and the Art of Life

art by Roderick Maclver

get your living by loving

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The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body - 

so that life be not a failure... 

If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, 

as most appear to do, 

I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for.  

I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.  

I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well.  

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.  

All great enterprises are self-supporting.  

The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, 

as a steam planing mill feeds its boiler with the shavings it makes.  

You must get your living by loving.

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~ Henry David Thoreau

from his journal, March 13, 1853

art by roderick maclver

a subtle magnetism

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I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, 

which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.

  It is not indifferent to us and which way we walk.  

 

There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness 

and stupidity to take the wrong one.  We would fain take that walk,

 never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly

 symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior

 and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult 

to choose our direction, because it does not yet

 exist distinctly in our ideas.

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~ Henry David Thoreau

from Walking, 1863

the divine faculty of the seer

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We begin to die, not in our senses or extremities, but in our divine faculties.  

Our members may be sound, our sight and hearing perfect, 

but our genius and imagination betray signs of decay.  

You tell me that you are growing old and are troubled to see without glasses, 

but this is unimportant if the divine faculty of the seer shows no signs of decay.

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~  Henry David Thoreau

from his journal, 1854

art by Roderick Maclver

annulment of all laws

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The infinite bustle of Nature on a summer's noon,  

or her infinite silence of a summer's night, 

gives utterance to no dogma.  

They do not say to us even with a seer's assurance, 

that this or that law is immutable and so ever and only can the universe exist.  

But they are the indifferent occasion for all things and the annulment of all laws.

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~ Henry David Thoreau

from his journal, 1840

art by roderick maclver

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the nick of time

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In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, 

I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, 

and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities,

 the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. 

You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, 

and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.

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~ Henry David Thoreau

from Economy, 1854

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the most pertinent question

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The longest silence is the most pertinent question

most pertinently put.

Emphatically silent.

The most important question,

whose answers concern us more than any, 

are never put in any other way.

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~ Henry David Thoreau

from his journal, 1851

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a man receives only what he is ready to receive

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A man receives only what he is ready to receive,

whether physically or intellectually or morally,

as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only.

We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.

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~ Henry David Thoreau

from a journal entry, 1860

art by Roderick Maclver

from Thoreau and the Art of Life

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a turtle's pace

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Consider the turtle.  A whole summer - June, July, and August -

 is not too good nor too much to hatch a turtle in.  

 

Perchance you have worried yourself, despaired of the world, 

meditated the end of life, and all things seemed rushing to destruction;

 but nature has steadily and serenely advanced with a turtle's pace.

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~ Henry David Thoreau

from a journal entry, 1856

art by Roderick Maclver

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It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know. 

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~  Henry David Thoreau

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the world is a musical instrument

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To be calm, to be serene! There is the calmness of the lake when there is not a breath of wind; there is the calmness of a stagnant ditch.  So is it with us.  Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as we never were before in our lives, not by an opiate, but by some unconscious obedience to the all-just laws, so that we become like a still lake of purest crystal and without an effort our depths are revealed to ourselves.  All the world goes by us and is reflected in our deeps.  Such clarity! obtained by such pure means!  by simple living, by honesty of purpose.  We live and rejoice.  I awoke into a music which no one by me heard.  Whom shall I thank for it?  The luxury of wisdom! the luxury of virtue!  Are there any intemperate in these things?  I feel my Maker blessing me.  To the sane man the world is a musical instrument.  The very touch affords an exquisite pleasure.

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~ Thoreau

journal entry, June 22, 1851

photo by Kathleen Connally

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our own limits transgressed

We need the tonic of wildness, 

to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow hen lurk, 

and hear the booming of the snipe; 

to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder 

and more solitary fowl builds her nest, 

and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.  

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 infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed 

by us because it is unfathomable. 

We can never have enough of nature.  

We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, 

vast and titanic features, the seacoast with its wrecks, 

the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, 

the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets.

We need to witness our own limits transgressed, 

and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

  

~ Thoreau

from Walden, "Spring," 1854

photo above by Kathleen Connally

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Thoreau's Journal

...

The obstacles which the heart meets with are like granite blocks which one alone cannot move. She who was as the morning light to me is now neither the morning star nor the evening star. We meet but to find each other further asunder, and the oftener we meet the more rapid our divergence. So a star of the first magnitude pales in the heavens, not from any fault in the observer’s eye nor from any fault in itself, perchance, but because its progress in its own system has put a greater distance between.

...

~ Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau's Journal

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Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation. We hear of cow commons and ministerial lots, but we want men-commons and lay lots, inalienable forever. Let us keep the New World new, preserve all the advantages of living in the country. There is meadow and pasture and wood-lot for the town’s poor. Why not a forest and huckleberry field for the town’s rich? All Walden Wood might have been preserved for our park forever, with Walden in its midst, and the Easterbrooks Country, an unoccupied area of some four square miles, might have been our huckleberry-field. If any owners of these tracts are about to leave the world without natural heirs who need or deserve to be specially remembered, they will do wisely to abandon their possession to all, and not will them to some individual who perhaps has enough already. As some give to Harvard College or another institution, why might not another give a forest or huckleberry-field to Concord? A town is an institution which deserves to be remembered. We boast of our system of education, but why stop at schoolmasters and schoolhouses? We are all schoolmasters, and our schoolhouse is the universe. To attend chiefly to the desk or schoolhouse while we neglect the scenery in which it is placed is absurd. If we do not look out we shall find our fine schoolhouse standing in a cow-yard at last.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.

 Live the life you have imagined.

~ Henry David Thoreau

from 'Walden'--In proportion as he simplifies his life

In proportion as he simplifies his life, 
the laws of the universe will appear less complex, 
and solitude will not be solitude, 
nor poverty poverty, 
nor weakness weakness. 
If you have built castles in the air, 
your work need not be lost; 
that is where they should be. 
Now put the foundations under them.

~ Henry Thoreau 

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life

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I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, 

to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, 

to cut a broad swath and shave close,

 to drive life into a corner, 

and reduce it to its lowest terms, 

and, if it proved to be mean, 

why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, 

and publish its meanness to the world;

 or if it were sublime,

 to know it by experience, 

and be able to give a true account of it.

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~ Henry David Thoreau

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