Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I drank the silence of God from a spring in the woods.

The people I don't understand are atheists. I go surfing and snowboarding, and I'm always around nature. I look at everything and think, 'Who couldn't believe there's a God? Is all this a mistake?' It just blows me away.

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.

When the Divine descends, you just accommodate.

We seem to have lost our contact with the primordial: the idea of - call it divine revelation as opposed to something that's learned by the human intellect - something that, if you lay yourself completely open, and you just open your heart completely, something will actually come into it.

I'm really obsessed with this idea that we're living in this environment where there's always magic around us that we are not perceiving.

I believe in God. I am not ritualistic but I do pray every day.

My engagement with mountains, rivers, and forests has been right from my childhood. I have lived in the jungles by myself; I have floated down rivers. So, I didn't experience these rivers, mountains, forests as some mythological figures but as thriving, living entities.

In L.A., I feel God more than I do in a church.

All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we knew how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him.

Lord, catch me off guard today. Surprise me with some moment of beauty or pain so that at least for the moment, I may be startled into seeing that you are here in all your splendor, always and everywhere, barely hidden, beneath, beyond, within this life I breathe.

I did however used to think, you know, in the woods walking, and as a kid playing in the woods, that there was a kind of immanence there — that woods, and places of that order, had a sense, a kind of presence, that you could feel; that there was something peculiarly, physically present, a feeling of place almost conscious ... like God. It evoked that.

Every time I'm in the woods, i feel like I'm in church.

In other words, first we must call people to communion with God, to intimacy with God, to a sense of belonging. Most people are lost, confused, alienated. They suffer and struggle immensely in relationships. We have to proclaim loudly and clearly in our actions and in our words that God loves us that we belong to him. That's a call to the mystical life.

There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the under currents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.

In this light my spirit suddenly saw through all, and in and by all creatures, even in herbs and grass it knew God, who he is, and how he is, and what his will is: And suddenly in that light my will was set on by a mighty impulse, to describe the being of God.

I am become a transparent eyeball.

Go out there into the glory of the woods. See God in every particle of them expressing glory and strength and power, tenderness and protection. Know that they are God expressing God made manifest.

The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions.

Who knows but on their sleep may rise Such light as never heaven let through To lighten earth from Paradise?

By the sense of mystery I understand the experience of certain places and times when one's whole nature seems to be in touch with a presence, a genius loci, a potency.

Were I a preacher, I should preach above all other things, the practice of the Presence of God.... Those who have the gale of the Holy Spirit go forward, even in sleep.

We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, that fire can purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all.