in Thoreau’s Journal

Nature is beautiful only as a place where a life is to be lived. It is not beautiful to him who has not resolved on a beautiful life.

 July 21, 1851

Now I yearn for one of those old, meandering, dry, uninhabited roads, which lead away from towns, which lead us away from temptation, which conduct to the outside of the earth…where you may forget what country you are travelling…It is wide enough, wide as the thoughts it allows to visit you…There I can walk and stalk and pace and plod. That’s the road I can travel, that’s the particular Sudbury I am bound for…There I can walk, and recover the lost child that I am without ringing any bell…The deliberate pace of a thinker never made a road the worse for travelling on.