Henry David Thoreau Heaven Quotations

The gifts of Heaven are never quite gratuitous.

There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,--all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!

Here or nowhere is our heaven.

A temple, you know, was anciently "an open place without a roof," whose walls served merely to shut out the world and direct the mind toward heaven; but a modern meeting-house shuts out the heavens, while it crowds the world into still closer quarters.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.

My eye is educated to discover anything on the ground, as chestnuts, etc. It is probably wholesomer to look at the ground much than at the heavens.

There is only one path to Heaven. On Earth, we call it Love.

Man emulates earth Earth emulates heaven Heaven emulates the Way The way emulates nature.

Nature is fair in proportion as the youth is pure. The heavens and the earth are one flower ; the earth is the calyx, the heavens the corolla.

Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid.

The chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground, and rising through the house to the heavens; evenafter the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent.

Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven?

It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker.

Heaven is not one of your fertile Ohio bottoms, you may depend on it.

We have need to be earth-born as well as heaven-born, gegeneis, as was said of the Titans of old, or in a better sense than they.

I always see those of whom I have heard well with a slight disappointment. They are so much better than the great herd, and yet the heavens are not shivered into diamonds over their heads.

Knowledge does not come to us in details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

The Heavens are as deep as our aspirations are high.

We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.