That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddled the Boiling spring with his foot, and he it is that has bruised off all the woods on Walden shore; that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the Country’s champion to thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?
Nature has no Iranian inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk of heaven! Ye disgrace Earth.
Let the thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmer’s crops? That is not its errand to thee.
Take shelter under the cloud while they flee to carts and sheds.
Let not to get a living, be thy trade but thy sport.
Enjoy the land, but own it not,
It is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. When a reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another.
* * * *
We discourse freely without shame of one form of sensuality and are silent about another.
* * * *
Maupertius seeing neither rhyme nor reason hi his life took to his bed and died of mortification,
* * * *
D’Alembert held a physician to be like a blind man who armed with a cudgel strikes at random, and, according as he strikes, annihilates the disease or – the patient.
“Philosophers,” he said, “should be like children who when they have done anything wrong, put the blame on the cat.”
* * * *
The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as to winter quarters and settled there, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. I felt complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. They never molested me seriously, though they bedded with me.
* * * *
Myself is more than a whole world to me.
And when the frost had smitten me on one cheek, heathen as I was, I turned to it the other also.
* * * *
There we worked…. building castles in the air for which Earth offered no worthy foundation.
We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream.
Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever?
So knowledge without love (Prem) purifies.