". . . there is something great in the moment when a man first strips himself of adventitious wrappages; and first sees indeed that he is naked, and as Swift has it, 'a forked straddling animal with bandy legs;' yet also a Spirit, and unalterable Mystery of Mysteries. . . Considering our present advanced state of culture, and how the Torch of Science has now been brandished and borne about, with more or less effect, for five thousand years and upwards; how, in these times especially, not only the Torch still burns, and perhaps more fiercly than ever, but innummerable rush-lights, and sulphur-matches, kindled thereat, are also glancing in every direction, so that not the smallest cranny or doghole in Nature or Art can remain unilluminated--it might strike the reflective mind with some surprise that hitherto nothing of a fundamental character, whether in the way of Philosophy or History, as been writen on the subject of Clothes." --Thomas Carlyle, introduction to Sartor Resartus presenting 'Die Leider, ihr Werden und Wirken [Clothes, their Origin and Influence] by Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, J.U.D., Professor der Allerly-Wissenschaft [Professor of Things in General] Weissnichtwo.

"Had my desire been to court the world's favor, I should have trimmed myself more bravely, and stood before it in a studied attitude. [But] I desire to be seen in my simple, natural, and everyday dress, without artifice or constraint; for it is myself I portray . . . [I]f my lot had been cast among those nations who are said to be still living in the sweet freedom of Nature's first laws, I assure you that I should have been quite prepared to give a full length, and quite naked, portrait of myself." Miguel de Montaigne, Note To the Reader introducing the first book of his Essays.

"It is part of my intention to set out everything as openly and clearly as possible. For nakedness of mind is the companion of innocence and simplicity, as nakedness of body once was."--Francis Bacon.

"So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. . . [the scientist] . . . surveys the world through a telescope or microscope, and never with his natural eye. . . .I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived . . . I wanted to live deep and suck the marrow out of life . . . [but] I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans." --Henry David Thoreau, Walden

"We plunge in the smooth flowing pools.We make our way to the middle of the stream and climb up on the pale round grey stones and sit naked in the sun and air, while the river glides away below us. And I know it is the place for which I have always longed, the place of wildness and freedom, to find which is the height of what one may hope for the place of unalloyed delight." Edmund Wilson, The Old Stone House

"I did not find magic in the past. I have been too close to the past: there in the [old stone] house . . . you can see exactly how as rural Americans we were living a century and a half ago. And who would go back to it? Not I. Let people who have never known country life complain that the farmer has been spoiled by his radio and his Ford. . . . why should I idealize it? too lonely, too poor, too provincial. . . I believe that a genuine love for the sea is one of the rarest things in the world; it is a special and bizarre taste, very seldom acquired. Of course, everybody loves the sea as it appears from the shore . . . [b]ut what can be said of its natural state, with no beach to civilize it? How can one enjoy its colossal stupidity, its monotony, its flatness? Frankly, I [also] hate the country. [After two days] I begin to hate those fields for their very calm, for their eternal indifference to everything that matters to me. I despise them for their willingness to go on breeding grasshoppers all their lives. I become impatient with the stolid trees; the heavy mountains oppress me. The gaudy and elaborate trappings which Nature assumes in the summer cannot deceive me for a moment as to her essential barrenness. I long unspeakably for some of the things that give life at last a semblance of meaning: conversation, libraries, music, politics, theaters. I am not one of those who has been able to find books in running brooks." Edmund Wilson

"In literature it is only the wild that attracts us . . . It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, and in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame so is the wild--the mallard-thought, which 'mid falling dews wings its way above the fens.'" Thoreau, Walking, from Major Essays of Thoreau.

"At Faunt de Gaume, the pictured grottoes of the first artists . . . it was nature, that mysterious god which had provided their cave paradise and their flint beginnings, that guided their hand on the new art. She had set in her natural sculpture of the rocks, in rough shapes of animals and heads, the first idea of art in man's mind. And she set in the natural veins and marks in the rock side the commencement of his grotto paintings. Each of the designs I have seen whether bison, or wildcat, or mammoth, has as its foundation line, some natural streak or ridge in the cave wall."--William Bolitha, Camera Obscura.

Cliffs of emerald topped with snow,
That lift and lift, and then let go
A great white avalanche of thunder.

-source unknown, quoted in Celia Thaxter's Among the Isles of Shoals

"A violent rain storm on the pond. The pond is covered with little white thorns; springing up and down; the pond is bristling with leaping white thorns, like the thorns on a small porcupine; bristles, then black waves cross it; black shudders, and the little water thorns are white; a helter-skelter rain and the elms tossing it up and down . . . now light from the sun; green and red; shiny; the pond a sage green; the grass a brilliant green; red berries on the hedges; the cows very white; purple over Asheham." A Writer's Diary-Virginia Woolf

"Besides the world is now so old, and so many eminent men have lived and thought for thousands of years, that there is little new to be discovered and expressed. Even my theory of colors is not entirely new. Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, and many other excellent men, have before me found and expressed the same thing in a detached form: my merit is, that I have found it also, that I have said it again, and that I have striven to bring forth the truth once more into a confused world." Conversations of Goethe

"Let no one say that I have said nothing new; the arrangement of the subject is new. When we play tennis, we both play with the same ball, but one of us places it better. . ." --Blaise Pascal.

--Robert Frost