Henry David Thoreau Swamps Quotations

A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it

The most primitive places left with us are the swamps, where the spruce still grows shaggy with usnea.

Making a logging-road in the Maine woods is called "swamping" it, and they who do the work are called "swampers." I now perceivedthe fitness of the term. This was the most perfectly swamped of all the roads I ever saw. Nature must have coöperated with art here.

I see less difference between a city and a swamp than formerly.

When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a Sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.

A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it.