I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature; and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, ...and, like the grave, cries, "Give, give!" The great fish swallow up the small; and he who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of government. You tell me of degrees of perfection to which human nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Death eats up all things, both the young lamb and old sheep; and I have heard our parson say, death values a prince no more than a... clown; all's fish that comes to his net; he throws at all, and sweeps stakes; he's no mower that takes a nap at noon- day, but drives on, fair weather or foul, and cuts down the green grass as well as the ripe corn: he's neither squeamish nor queesy-stomach'd, for he swallows without chewing, and crams down all things into his ungracious maw; and tho' you can see no belly he has, he has a confounded dropsy, and thirsts after men's lives, which he guggles down like mother's milk.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I said I had the tree. It wasn't true. The opposite was true. The tree had me.... The minute it was left with me alone, It caught me up as if I were the fish And it the fishpole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I was a young girl salmon fishing with my father in the Straits of Juan de Fuca in Washington State I used to lean out over t...he water and try to look past my own face, past the reflection of the boat, past the sun and darkness, down to where the fish were surely swimming. I made up charm songs and word-hopes to tempt the fish, to cause them to mean biting my hook. I believed they would do it if I asked them well and patiently and with the right hope. I am writing my poems like this. I have used the fabric and the people of my life as the bait.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then we have difficulties between soldiers, very slight and easily disposed of; but troubles between soldiers and the carpenters w...hose tools disappear mysteriously, and farmers in the neighborhood who go to bed with roosts of barnyard fowl and wake up chickenless and fowlless, are more troublesome.... Our men are fully equal to the famous Massachusetts men in a mechanical way. They build quarters, ditches, roads, traps; dig wells, catch fish, kill squirrels, etc., etc., and it is really a new sensation, the affection and pride one feels respecting such a body of men in the aggregate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you meet a cross-eyed person you must plunge into the grass,... alongside the chilly ants, fish through the green fingernails and come up with the four-leaf clover....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods wide along the northerly and westerly sides, and wider still the east end. A gr...eat field of ice has cracked off from the main body. I hear a song sparrow singing from the bushes on the shore,--olit, olit, olit,--chip, chip, chip, che char,--che wiss, wiss, wiss. He too is helping to crack it. How handsome the great sweeping curves in the edge of the ice, answering somewhat to those of the shore, but more regular! It is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but transient cold, and all watered or waved like a palace floor. But the wind slides eastward over its opaque surface in vain, till it reaches the living surface beyond. It is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore,--a silvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus, as it were all one active fish. Such is the contrast between winter and spring. Walden is dead and is alive again. But this spring it broke up more steadily, as I have said.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When at the pond, I wished sometimes to add fish to my fare for variety. I have actually fished from the same kind of necessity th...at the first fishers did. Whatever humanity I might conjure up against it was all factitious, and concerned my philosophy more than my feelings. I speak of fishing only now, for I had long felt differently about fowling, and sold my gun before I went to the woods. Not that I am less humane than others, but I did not perceive that my feelings were much affected. I did not pity the fishes nor the worms. This was habit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let a man get up and say, "Behold, this is the truth," and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the backgr...ound. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What's the use of worrying? It never was worth while,... So, pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, And smile, smile, smile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »