'a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors'

Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or Life in the Woods (1854)