51
As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.
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52
Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.
53
The whole point depends upon his being at once humble enough to wonder, and haughty enough to defy.
54
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
55
With the first word I used intelligently, I learned to live, to think, to hope.
56
No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.
57
The hand is my feeler with which I reach through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity that my fingers encounter.
58
My world is built of touch-sensations, devoid of physical colour and sound; but without colour and sound it breathes and throbs with life.
59
With the dropping of a little word from another's hand into mine, a slight flutter of the fingers, began the intelligence, the joy, the fullness of my life.
60
Whatever moves me, whatever thrills me, is as a hand that touches me in the dark, and that touch is my reality.
61
Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.
62
What to the intellect is old and worn-out is perennially young and fresh to the heart; curiosity is insatiable, but love is never tired.
63
My most sacred and memorable life is commonly on awaking in the morning.
Henry David Thoreauverified·Journal, Volume II: 1850-September 15, 1851 (ed. Bradford Torrey)·May 24, 1851
64
Entomology extends the limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom.
65
Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children.
66
Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
67
Character, says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms, character is destiny. But not the whole of our destiny.
Wrongly attributed
Character is destiny is routinely credited to Heraclitus, on the strength of a fragment usually given as a man's character is his fate. That translation is itself contested, and the English aphorism does not come from it: it comes from Novalis, and reached English readers through George Eliot, who quotes him here in 1860 and immediately qualifies it. The half everyone drops is the half Eliot wrote.
68
It is not down in any map; true places never are
69
Concentration is an aid to the doing of something; it is not the doing of something in itself.
70
Man is a thought-being, and his life and character are determined by the thoughts in which he habitually dwells.
71
Nothing comes unbidden; where the shadow is, there also is the substance.
72
Genius is free to announce its inventions and discoveries, and the hand is free to accomplish whatever the head conceives not incompatible with the rights of a fellow-being.
73
Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously.
74
Can authority be more amiable and respectable when it descends from accidents or institutions established in remote antiquity than when it springs fresh from the hearts and judgments of an honest and enlightened people?
75
The greatness and the minuteness of nature pass all understanding.