Love and Success- Podcast 216

July 20th, 2015 Tags: kate loving's PRSYER Podcast, The Prayer Prescription Series
Posted in Prayer Prescription Series

This is the Henry David Thoreau quote I paraphrased on today’s podcast! 
Listen in!!

“There must be the generating force of Love behind every effort destined to be successful.” Henry David Thoreau. 

And more Thoreau quotes on Nature- Mother Nature, that is!

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, — to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.
  — “Walking”

I have a room all to myself; it is nature.
  — Journal, 3 January 1853

Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life.
  — “Natural History of Massachusetts”

Nature would not appear so rich, the profusion so rich, if we knew a use for everything.
  — Journal, 11 August 1853

Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. I read in Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground, of the magnolia, and the Florida keys, and their warm sea breezes; of the fence-rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the rice-bird; of the breaking up of winter in Labrador, and the melting of the snow on the forks of the Missouri; and owe an accession of health to these reminiscences of luxuriant nature.
  — “Natural History of Massachusetts”

I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp, — tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it.
  — Walden
I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen.
  — “Walking”

How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health!
  — Journal, 6 May 1851

I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. if this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose al hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.
  — Journal, 3 January 1853

Nature has left nothing to the mercy of man.
  — Journal, 22 March 1861

Left to herself, nature is always more or less civilized, and delights in a certain refinement; but where the axe has encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had concealed with green banks of verdure, are exposed to sight.
  — “A Walk to Wachusett”

I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.
  — Journal, February 1851

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world, into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the cause-way to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.
  — “Walking”

Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?
  — The Maine Woods

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his sense still.
  — Walden

We, too, are out, obeying the same law with all nature. Not less important are the observers of the birds than the birds themselves.
  — Journal, 20 March 1858

When I find a new and rare plant in Concord I seem to think it has but just sprung up here — that is is, and not I am, the newcomer — while it has grown here for ages before I was born.
  — Journal, 2 September 1856

If any part of nature excites our pity, it is for ourselves we grieve, for there is eternal health and beauty. We get only transient and partial glimpses of the beauty of the world. Standing at the right angle, we are dazzled by the colors of the rainbow in colorless ice. From the right point of view, every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow. Beauty and music are not mere traits and exceptions. They are the rule and character. It is the exception that we see and hear.
  — Journal, 11 December 1855

I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest.
  — Journal, 16 November 1850

There is no law so strong which a little gladness may not transgress. Pile up your books, the records of sadness, your saws and your laws. Nature is glad outside, and her merry worms within will ere long topple them down.
  — Journal, 3 January 1853

How happens it we reverence the stones which fall from another planet, and not the stones which belong to this — another globe, not this — heaven, and not earth? Are not the stones in Hodge’s wall as good as the aerolite at Mecca? Is not our broad back-door-stone as good as any corner-stone in heaven.
  — Journal, 30 August 1856

After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined, and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and course. A hard, insensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rock, whose hearts are comparatively soft.
  — Journal, 15 November 1853

How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health! The discipline of the schools or of business can never impart such serenity to the mind.
  — Journal, 6 May 1851

A Note on the Text: Unless otherwise noted, quotations are from The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906)