Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Dying

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

  Henry David Thoreau

  Inspirational, Life, Death

  Walden ch. 2 (1854)

• Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Funny, Life, Death

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.69, Delphi Classics

• I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Real, Loneliness, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “Walden; Or, Life in the Woods”, p.89, Courier Corporation

• We are ever dying to one world and being born into another.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Death, Dying, World

  Henry David Thoreau (1960). “H. D. Thoreau, a Writer's Journal”, p.20, Courier Corporation

• When we are in health, all sounds fife and drum for us; we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Loss, Echoes, Air

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.123, Xist Publishing

• Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, - passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man's capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to!

  Henry David Thoreau

  Music, Night, Men

  Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.159, Courier Corporation

• I have heard a good many pretend that they are going to die; or that they have died, for aught that I know. Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it. They have n't got life enough in them.... Only half a dozen or so have died since the world began.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Good Man, Dying

  Henry David Thoreau (1906). “Journal”

• If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Sweet, Heart

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Walden”, p.70, Xist Publishing

• Generally speaking, the political news, whether domestic or foreign, might be written today for the next ten years with sufficientaccuracy. Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and I might attend.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Country, Years, Rivers

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.532, Simon and Schuster

• Of all the men who were said to be my contemporaries, it seemed to me that John Brown was the only one who had not died.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Dying, John Brown

  Henry David Thoreau (1992). “The Essays of Henry David Thoreau”, p.72, Rowman & Littlefield

• I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once moreonly the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,--those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Echoes, Names

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “The Most Alive is the Wildest – Thoreau’s Complete Works on Living in Harmony with the Nature: Walden, Walking, Night and Moonlight, The Highland Light, A Winter Walk, The Maine Woods, A Walk to Wachusett, The Landlord, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Autumnal Tints, Wild Apples…”, p.393, e-artnow

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