We must soften into a credulity below the milkiness of infancy to think all men virtuous. We must be tainted with a malignity trul...y diabolical, to believe all the world to be equally wicked and corrupt.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Flowers ... that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their colouring as gorgeous as the heavens, had thro...ugh thousands of years been the heritage of children--honoured as the jewellery of God only by them--when suddenly the voice of Christianity, counter-signing the voice of infancy, raised them to a grandeur transcending the Hebrew throne, although founded by God himself, and pronounced Solomon in all his glory not to be arrayed like one of these.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of i...nfancy even into the era of manhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We Americans are supposed to be overly concerned about the child. But actually the intelligent care of children in our society is ...balanced by a crass indifference to the helplessness of infancy and youth. Cruelty to children has become more widespread but less noticed in the general unrest, the constant migration, the family disintegration, and the other manifestations of a civilization that has been torn away from its original moorings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enoug...h to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in this neighborhood, on account both of its greater depth and its having no strea...m passing through it to melt or wear away the ice.... It indicates better than any water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being least affected by transient changes of temperature. A severe cold of a few days' duration in March may very much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the temperature of Walden increases almost uninterruptedly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You may have known your neighbor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and despai...red of the world; but the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, re-creating the world, and you ... feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They are not callow like the young of most birds, but more perfectly developed and precocious even than chickens. The remarkably a...dult yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes is very memorable. All intelligence seems reflected in them. They suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience. Such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coeval with the sky it reflects. The woods do not yield another such a gem.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »