Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Mothers

• If Nature is our mother, then God is our father.

  Henry David Thoreau

  God, Mother, Nature

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.265, Xist Publishing

• We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which came and went on the western sky, and the mother-o'-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Sea, Fishing

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Walden (Diversion Classics)”, p.258, Diversion Books

• The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Book, Character

  Henry David Thoreau (1939). “Walden: or, Life in the woods”

• Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return-prepared to send beck our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, brother and sister, and wife and child and friends and never see them again,-if you have paid your debts and made your will, and settled your affairs and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Brother, Children

• Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours,
  Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children,
  as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned
  from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively
  an interaction of man on man.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Nature, Children

  Henry David Thoreau, Joseph O. Valentine, Thoreau Society (2001). “Thoreau on Land: Nature's Canvas”, p.44, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Spiritual, Uncles

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.194, Penguin

• When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Father, Writing

  Henry David Thoreau (2006). “Thoreau and the Art of Life: Precepts and Principles”, p.13, Heron Dance Press

• There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knolwedge, Grammatica parda, tawny grammar, a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Children, Knowledge

• Christianity only hopes. It has hung its harp on the willows, and cannot sing a song in a strange land. It has dreamed a sad dream, and does not yet welcome the morning with joy. The mother tells her falsehoods to her child, but, thank heaven, the child does not grow up in its parent's shadow. Our mother's faith has not grown with her experience. Her experience has been too much for her. The lesson of life was too hard for her to learn.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Dream, Song

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.71, Delphi Classics

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