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Book beginning: page 1

A note from Penman’s Guide: The following is a summary of Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods, in bullet point form. The idea is to present this theory in the most direct manner possible, bearing in mind its final use for literary analysis. Where possible, his own words have been maintained, but ideas and paragraphs condensed to make more concise points for analysis. The theory has been summarized in detail by chapter and maintains the original American spelling. His first person approach has been kept, so all uses of ‘I’ are in reference to Thoreau himself.

Economy

• Most men are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day. He has no time to be any thing but a machine. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly (p3).
• How vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, indicates, his fate (p4).
• The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things (p4).
• They honestly think there is no choice left. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What every body echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields (p5).
• Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot (p5).
• Man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried (p6).
• The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of any thing, it is very likely to be my good behaviour. What demon possessed me that I behave so well? (p6).
• One generation abandons the enterprises of another (p6).
• Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength (p6).
• We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! (p6).
• It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods had been taken to obtain them; the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence (p7).
• By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. To many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life, Food (p7).
• The necessaries of life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it (p7).
• The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with out beds, which are our night-clothes, shelter within a shelter. The poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails (p8).
• Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays. At the present day, and in this country, as I find by my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow etc. and for the studious, lamplight, stationary, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live, - that is, keep comfortably warm, - and die in New England at last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot (p8).
• With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor (p8).
• The ancient philosophers: none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward (p8/9).
• None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty (p9).
• There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically (p9).
• When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous incessant and hotter fires, and the like (p9).
• I speak to the mass of men who are disconnected, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them (p10).
• The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others? (p12).
• My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles (p12).
• I have always endeavoured to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensible to every man (p12).
• Taking advantage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all improvements in navigation (p12).
• The object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe (p13).
• 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. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon (p13/4).
• Only they who go to soirees and legislative halls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Beware of all the enterprises that require new clothes, if you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be (p14/5).
• When I asked for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now,” not emphasizing the “They” at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say. I am for a moment absorbed in thought, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly. Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on? We worship not the Graces, but Fashion. I sometimes despair of getting any thing quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men (p15/6).
• Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it, which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people. The manufactures have learnt that this taste is merely whimsical. I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The principle object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched (p16/7).
• As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a necessary of life, though there are instances of men having done without it for long periods in colder countries than this. Man wanted a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections (p17).
• It would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction 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 (p18).
• The savage own his shelter because it costs so little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot afford to own it (p19).
• Bankruptcy and repudiation are the spring-boards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine (p21).
• When the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them; only death will set them free (p21).
• I found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself (p32).
• I cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in great measure vanish. Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made. I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end (p32/3).
• Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things (p33).
• This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet (p35).
• When men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or artistic, but luxurious and idle work, with their assistance, it is inevitable that a few do all the exchange work or, in other words, become the slaves of the strongest (p37).
• One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon. As for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same all the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to (p37).
• Men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries (p40).
• Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances (p41).
• If I have to drag my trap, I will take care that it be a light one and do not nip me in a vital part. But perchance it would be wisest never to put one’s paw into it (p43).
• A lady once offered me a mat, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil (p44).
• Some are “industrious,” and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do. The laborer’s day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other (p46).
• I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely. I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do (p46).
• The only cooperation which is commonly possible is exceedingly partial and superficial. If a man has faith he will cooperate with equal faith every where; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to (p47).
• The man who goes alone can start to-day; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off (p47).
• There are those who have used all their arts to pursued me to undertake the support of some poor family in the town. However, when I have thought to indulge myself in this respect, and lay their Heaven under an obligation by maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as comfortably as I maintain myself, and have even ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor (p47).
• Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will; set about being good (p48).
• Philanthropy is not love for one’s fellow-man in the broadest sense. I never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any good to me, or the like of me (p49).
• I would not subtract any thing from the praise that is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious (p50).
• We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion (p50).

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

• [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 (p55).
• I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them (p56).
• What should we think of the shepherd’s life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts? (p58).
• I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me (p58).
• If they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, 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 a man to elevate his life by a 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, which morally we can do (p59).
• 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 (p59).
• Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. Simplify, simplify (p59/60).
• The nation itself, with all its so called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps. Men think it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? (p60).
• If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? (p61).
• How much more important to know what that is which was never old! [Upon the question] What is your master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them (p62).
• Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one (p62).
• 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 Nights’ Entertainments. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, - that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure (p62).
• The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us (p63).
• Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails. Why should we go with the stream? (p63).

Reading

• In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident (p64).
• To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written (p66).
• A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; - not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech. Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Their author’s are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind (p67).
• The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing. I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our a b abs, and words of one syllable (p68).
• There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell. One who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it (p69).
• A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading. Shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him (p69/70).
• We boast that we belong to the nineteenth century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this village does for its own culture. We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment. It is time that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities. This town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a town-house, thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend so much on living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred years. If we will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the world at once? (p71).
• Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men (p72).

Sounds

• For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. Nothing memorable is accomplished. This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standards, I should not have been found wanting (p73).
• Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour (p73).

Solitude

• I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced (p85).
• There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness (p85).
• 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 star. 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 to one another (p86/7).
• By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another (p87/8).
• A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows (p88).
• Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications (p88/9).
• What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Our great-grandmother Nature’s universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always (p90).

Visitors

• I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain (p91).
• Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them. If we speak reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to be further apart, that all animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate (p91).
• What danger is there if you don’t think of any? (p99).

The Bean-Field

• My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks (p101).
• 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 (p102).
• Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid (p106).
• We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness (107).
• Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time (p107).
• Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our Cattle-shows and so called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him (p107).

The Village

• It is surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and head-lands; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round, - for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, - do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations (p111).
• Wherever 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 (p111).
• I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simple as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough (p112).

The Ponds

• It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. The ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off in the market cart, and they become mere provender. As long as Eternal Justice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported thither from the country’s hills (p112/3).
• A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature (p121).
• I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop of the teacher’s desk (p125).
• Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe, and the dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the villagers, who scarcely know where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink, are thinking to bring its water, which should be as sacred as the Ganges at least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their dishes with! – to earn their Walden by the turning of a cock or drawing of a plug (p125).
• Many men have been likened to [Walden Pond], but few deserve that honour. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its boarder, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its ripples. It is perennially young (p125).
• What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, to give his name to it? Who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers. Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislator gave him, - him who thought only of its money value; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where every thing has its price; who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get any thing for him; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone (p127/8).

Baker Farm

• As I did not work hard, I did not have to eat hard; but as [others] began with tea, and coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, [they] had to work hard to pay for them, and when [they] had worked hard [they] had to eat hard again to repair the waste of [their systems], - and so it was as broad as it was long, indeed it was broader than it was long, for [they were] discontented and wasted [their lives] into the bargain (p133).
• The only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things (p133).

Higher Laws

• 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 (p136).
• He who is only a traveller learns things at second-hand and by the halves (p136).
• Such is oftenest the young man’s introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The mass of men are still and always young in this respect (p138).
• I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. Always when I have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished. At present I am no fisherman at all. But I see that if I were to live in a wilderness I should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest (p138/9).
• 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. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth (p139).
• I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind (p139).
• [Man] can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way. He will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet (p140).
• If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him. The faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and customs of mankind. No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the results were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man (p140).
• I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea. Who has not sometimes derived an inexplicable satisfaction from his food in which appetite had no share? Not that food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten. It is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savors (p140/1).
• Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails. Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive (p141/2).
• The spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace (p142).
• All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite. From exertion comes wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome. What avails it that you are Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen? (p143).
• Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own. 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 imbrute them (p144).

Brute Neighbors

• You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns (p148).
• The poor bird cannot be omnipresent; if he dive here he must come up there (p151).

House Warming

• A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird’s nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there, - in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you (p157/8).
• It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts; in most parts of the world the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them (p162).

Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors

• The one who came from the farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep (p173).

The Pond in Winter

• Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask (p182).
• Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful (p188).

Spring

• The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit, - not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic (p199).
• Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. 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 (p205/6).

Conclusion

• The universe is wider than our views of it. The other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely (p207).
• Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought (p207).
• Some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay (p207).
• It 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 (p208).
• Learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all climes, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and Explore thyself (p208).
• It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such (p208/9).
• It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. 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! (p209).
• If 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 common hours. New, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies 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 need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them (p209).
• It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. As if that were important, and there were not enough to understand you without them. As if Nature could support but one order of understandings (p209).
• In view of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side (p210).
• Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. Why should we be in such a 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 (p210).
• No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe (p211/2).
• However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is (p212).
• Most think that they are above being supported by the town; but it oftener happens that they are not above supporting themselves by dishonest means, which should be more disreputable. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts (p212).
• 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 (p212).
• If you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul (p212/3).
• Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction, - a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. So will help you God, and so only (p214).
• Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me the truth (p214).
• I called on the king, but he made me wait in his hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for hospitality. There was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree. His manners were truly regal. I should have done better had I called on him (p214).
• There is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life. These may be but the spring months in the life of the race. We are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! (p214/5).
• There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. We think that we can change our clothes only (p215).
• The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands (p215).

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Dover Publications, Inc, 1995.