Jess D > Jess's Quotes

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Things do not change; we change.”
― henry david thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?”
― Henry David Thoreau, Familiar letters

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal- that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”
― Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

“I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety. I am ready to try this for the next ten thousand years, and exhaust it. How sweet to think of! my extremities well charred, and my intellectual part too, so that there is no danger of worm or rot for a long while. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I can alter my life by altering my attitude. He who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals

“The earth laughs in flowers.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is not the length of life, but the depth.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”
― Pablo Neruda

“so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping
but
I shall go on living.”
― Pablo Neruda

“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
― Annie Dillard

“The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
― Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

“Never let me lose the marvel
of your statue-like eyes, or the accent
the solitary rose of your breath
places on my cheek at night.

I am afraid of being, on this shore,
a branchless trunk, and what I most regret
is having no flower, pulp, or clay
for the worm of my despair.

If you are my hidden treasure,
if you are my cross, my dampened pain,
if I am a dog, and you alone my master,

never let me lose what I have gained,
and adorn the branches of your river
with leaves of my estranged Autumn.”
― Federico García Lorca

“I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.”
― Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

“Finding is losing something else.
I think about, perhaps even mourn,
what I lost to find this”
― Richard Brautigan, Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork

“Boo, Forever

Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a
top,
I'm haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.”
― Richard Brautigan, The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster

“I’m haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.”
― Richard Brautigan