Henry David Thoreau on Nature

or Life in the Woods

“The man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way.

After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, he soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigoraed each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make.

All memorable events, I should say, transpire in the morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, “All intellegences awake with the morning.”

Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of actions of men date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise.

To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men.

Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”