Changed
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2006
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I took the liberty of recording every meaningful quote from Walden and typed it up-- one, because I quickly came to realize that Walden is the greatest book ever written; and two, because even re-writing what great writers once wrote can improve your own writing. The first 67 pages, I organized by tone or subject matter, and the final 166 I organized by chapter:
Implicating:
“How many poor immortal souls have I met well neigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life…
The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor…
Most men, in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them […] He has no time to be anything but a machine.
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.
The improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential law of man’s existence…
At last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth, the field is a great distance. It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstructions between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.
I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.
But lo! men have become the tools of their tools…
The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.
Pertaining to the ‘Self’:
“Public opinion is a week tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be…
The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage…
A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince…
Morning is when I’m awake and there is a dawn in me…
About old people and old things:
“No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silences passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their field. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.
Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were.
On frugality:
“Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others are still entirely unknown…
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor.
No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.
Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.
Indeed, the more [possessions] you have, the poorer you are…
[M]y greatest skill has been to want but little…
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
I had found thus that I had become a rich man without any damage to my poverty…
For as long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.
Inspiring:
“The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to have been cared for. According to Evelyn, ‘the wise Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman praetors have decided how often a man can go into his neighbor’s land to gather the acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor.’ Hippocrates has even left directions on how we should cut our nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, ‘be not afflicted my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?’
One day […] I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience , as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life…
‘Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again’
Philosophical:
“Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages…
All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.
Wherever I sat […] the landscape radiated from me accordingly…
That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way…
Nationalism:
Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave […] One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon…
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root…
Personal favorites:
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not be mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep…
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor…
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look…
Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!
If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Night’s Entertainments…
God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives conceiving then…
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains…
Be it life or death, we crave only reality.
...
Reading:
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
Sounds:
What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most adrimable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?
Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.
I love a broad margin in my life…
Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.
Solitude:
There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and his senses still.
While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.
This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder stars, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our own instruments? Why should I feel lonely?
What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer one to another.
However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and critism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you.
When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.
To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating.
I love to be alone.
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be were he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,— of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,— such health, such cheer, they afford forever!
Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?
What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Not my or thy grand-father’s, but our great-grandmother Nature’s universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always…
Visitors:
It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain.
I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most part, so far as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was deposited around me.
f a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
The Bean-Field:
I would advise you to do all your work, if possible, while the dew is on…
Labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.
Commonly, men will only be as brave as their fathers were brave, or timid…
We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction.
The Village:
It is surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time.
[A] man needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost…
Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not til we are lost, in other words, not til we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are in the infinte extent of our relations.
[W]herever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run ‘amok’ against society; but I preffered that society should run ‘amok’ against me, it being the desperate party.
I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in the communities where some have got more than is sufficient while other have not enough.
The Ponds:
Talk of Heaven! ye disgrace earth.
Higher Laws:
As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented.
I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.
I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do…
[We] might go there a thousand times before the sediment [sinks] to the bottom and leave [our] purpose pure; but no doubt such a clarifying process [has been] going on all the while.
*Regarding the eating of meat:
[T]here is something essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh…
Having been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from an unusually complete experience. The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to.
The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct.
I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularlly inclinced to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind.
*
The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.
It is not worth the while to live by rich cookery.
Whatever my own practice be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his own genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes or even the insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies. The faintest assured objection which on healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and the custom of mankind. No man ever followed his genius til it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for those were a life in conformity to the higher principles.
If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal— that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself.
The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
*On sobriety
I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to the opium-eater’s heaven. I would [gladly] keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for the wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor[…] Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Of all ebrosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?
*
He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.
Goodness is the only virtue that never fails.
We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupies our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I feat that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure.
Who knows what sort of life would result if we attained to purity?
*On chastity
Chastity is the flowering of man.
Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open…
By turns our purity inspires us and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out of him day by day, and the devine being established.
From exertion come winsdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality.
*
Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrace them.
[P]ractice some new austerity, to let [your] mind descend into [your] body and redeem it, and treat [yourself] with ever increasing respect.
Spring:
Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wilderness,— to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and explorable, that land and see be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomable by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustable vigor, vast and Titanic features…
We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander…
Conclusion:
The universe is wider than our views of it.
‘Direct your eye right inward, and you’ll find /
A thousand regions in your mind /
Yet undiscovered. travel them, and be /
Expert in home-cosmography.’
Be the Lewis and Clarke of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes…
e a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
t is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.
It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particlar route, and make a beaten track for our selves. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!
f one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in the common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.
In proportion as he simplified his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work will need not be lost; that is where they should be— now put the foundation under them.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We shall not be shipwrecked on a vain reality.
Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it bad names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest.
[T]he fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.
Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.
Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction…
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its head from me who might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cherring information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over me the human insect.
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning-star."
I'm not sure why I did this: it just seemed like a good thing to do. Chances are, most people probably won't be bothered to read all these quotes, let alone the entirety of the book. Or, perhaps, one person will be stirred to read the book after looking at some of these quotes. That's all fine...
Or, if you like Thoreau too, you could just post about it now?
Implicating:
“How many poor immortal souls have I met well neigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life…
The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor…
Most men, in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them […] He has no time to be anything but a machine.
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.
The improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential law of man’s existence…
At last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth, the field is a great distance. It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstructions between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.
I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.
But lo! men have become the tools of their tools…
The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.
Pertaining to the ‘Self’:
“Public opinion is a week tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be…
The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage…
A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince…
Morning is when I’m awake and there is a dawn in me…
About old people and old things:
“No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silences passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their field. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.
Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were.
On frugality:
“Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others are still entirely unknown…
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor.
No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.
Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.
Indeed, the more [possessions] you have, the poorer you are…
[M]y greatest skill has been to want but little…
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
I had found thus that I had become a rich man without any damage to my poverty…
For as long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.
Inspiring:
“The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to have been cared for. According to Evelyn, ‘the wise Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman praetors have decided how often a man can go into his neighbor’s land to gather the acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor.’ Hippocrates has even left directions on how we should cut our nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, ‘be not afflicted my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?’
One day […] I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience , as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life…
‘Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again’
Philosophical:
“Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages…
All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.
Wherever I sat […] the landscape radiated from me accordingly…
That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way…
Nationalism:
Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave […] One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon…
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root…
Personal favorites:
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not be mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep…
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor…
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look…
Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!
If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Night’s Entertainments…
God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives conceiving then…
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains…
Be it life or death, we crave only reality.
...
Reading:
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
Sounds:
What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most adrimable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?
Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.
I love a broad margin in my life…
Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.
Solitude:
There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and his senses still.
While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.
This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder stars, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our own instruments? Why should I feel lonely?
What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer one to another.
However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and critism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you.
When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.
To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating.
I love to be alone.
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be were he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,— of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,— such health, such cheer, they afford forever!
Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?
What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Not my or thy grand-father’s, but our great-grandmother Nature’s universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always…
Visitors:
It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain.
I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most part, so far as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was deposited around me.
f a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
The Bean-Field:
I would advise you to do all your work, if possible, while the dew is on…
Labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.
Commonly, men will only be as brave as their fathers were brave, or timid…
We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction.
The Village:
It is surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time.
[A] man needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost…
Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not til we are lost, in other words, not til we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are in the infinte extent of our relations.
[W]herever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run ‘amok’ against society; but I preffered that society should run ‘amok’ against me, it being the desperate party.
I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in the communities where some have got more than is sufficient while other have not enough.
The Ponds:
Talk of Heaven! ye disgrace earth.
Higher Laws:
As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented.
I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.
I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do…
[We] might go there a thousand times before the sediment [sinks] to the bottom and leave
*Regarding the eating of meat:
[T]here is something essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh…
Having been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from an unusually complete experience. The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to.
The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct.
I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularlly inclinced to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind.
*
The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.
It is not worth the while to live by rich cookery.
Whatever my own practice be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his own genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes or even the insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies. The faintest assured objection which on healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and the custom of mankind. No man ever followed his genius til it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for those were a life in conformity to the higher principles.
If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal— that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself.
The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
*On sobriety
I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to the opium-eater’s heaven. I would [gladly] keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for the wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor[…] Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Of all ebrosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?
*
He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.
Goodness is the only virtue that never fails.
We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupies our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I feat that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure.
Who knows what sort of life would result if we attained to purity?
*On chastity
Chastity is the flowering of man.
Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open…
By turns our purity inspires us and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out of him day by day, and the devine being established.
From exertion come winsdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality.
*
Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrace them.
[P]ractice some new austerity, to let [your] mind descend into [your] body and redeem it, and treat [yourself] with ever increasing respect.
Spring:
Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wilderness,— to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and explorable, that land and see be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomable by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustable vigor, vast and Titanic features…
We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander…
Conclusion:
The universe is wider than our views of it.
‘Direct your eye right inward, and you’ll find /
A thousand regions in your mind /
Yet undiscovered. travel them, and be /
Expert in home-cosmography.’
Be the Lewis and Clarke of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes…
e a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
t is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.
It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particlar route, and make a beaten track for our selves. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!
f one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in the common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.
In proportion as he simplified his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work will need not be lost; that is where they should be— now put the foundation under them.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We shall not be shipwrecked on a vain reality.
Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it bad names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest.
[T]he fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.
Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.
Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction…
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its head from me who might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cherring information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over me the human insect.
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning-star."
I'm not sure why I did this: it just seemed like a good thing to do. Chances are, most people probably won't be bothered to read all these quotes, let alone the entirety of the book. Or, perhaps, one person will be stirred to read the book after looking at some of these quotes. That's all fine...
Or, if you like Thoreau too, you could just post about it now?
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