Henry David Thoreau Moon Quotations

Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not tempted to explore it,--to penetrate to the shores of its Lake Tchad, and discover the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the Moon? Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are to be found? In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, there is where all Niles have their hidden heads. The expeditions up the Nile as yet extend but to the Cataracts, or perchance to the mouth of the White Nile; but it is the black Nile that concerns us.

Men talk glibly enough about moonshine, as if they knew its qualities very well, and despised them; as owls might talk of sunshine,--none of your sunshine!--but this word commonly means merely something which they do not understand,--which they are abed and asleep to, however much it may be worth their while to be up and awake to it.

Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted,but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.

The poet who walks by moonlight is conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world, into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the cause-way to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.

The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile,... the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world.

The very dogs that sullenly bay the moon from farm-yards in these nights excite more heroism in our breasts than all the civil exhortations or war sermons of the age.

It becomes the moralist, too, to inquire what man might do to improve and beautify the system; what to make the stars shine more brightly, the sun more cheery and joyous, the moon more placid and content.

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.

Perchance, coming generations will not abide the dissolution of the globe, but, availing themselves of future inventions in aerial locomotion, and the navigation of space, the entire race may migrate from the earth, to settle some vacant and more western planet.... It took but little art, a simple application of natural laws, a canoe, a paddle, and a sail of matting, to people the isles of the Pacific, and a little more will people the shining isles of space. Do we not see in the firmament the lights carried along the shore by night, as Columbus did? Let us not despair or mutiny.

By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.

Not secondary to the sun, she gives us his blaze again, Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day... In Heaven queen she is among the spheres; She, mistress-like, makes all things to be pure.

One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.

So long as a man is faithful to himself, everything is in his favor, government, society, the very sun, moon, and stars.

Youth gets together with their materials to build a bridge to the moon or maybe a palace on earth; then in middle age they decide to build a woodshed with them instead.