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The Thoreau Institute
at Walden Woods Library
Thoreau's
Life & Writings
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Henry D. Thoreau Quotation Pages
On Simplicity
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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, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a
million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb
nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are
the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to
be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and
go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning,
and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify,
simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but
one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in
proportion. [Walden,
"Where I Lived and What I Lived For"]]
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As for
the complex ways of living, I love them not, however much I practice
them. In as many places as possible, I will get my feet down to the
earth. [Journal, 22 October 1853]
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Every morning was a cheerful
invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence,
with Nature herself. [Walden]
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I
do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many
trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day;
how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the
mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the
equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms.
So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the
real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. [Thoreau to
H.G.O. Blake, 27 March 1848]
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What you call bareness and poverty is
to me simplicity. God could not be unkind to me if he should try. I love
the winter, with its imprisonment and its cold, for it compels the
prisoner to try new fields and resources. I love to have the river
closed up for a season and a pause put to my boating, to be obliged to
get my boat in. I shall launch it again in the spring with so much more
pleasure. This is an advantage in point of abstinence and moderation
compared with the seaside boating, where the boat ever lies on the
shore. I love best to have each thing in its season only, and enjoy
doing without it at all other times. It is the greatest of all
advantages to enjoy no advantage at all. I find it invariably true, the
poorer I am, the richer I am. What you consider my disadvantage, I
consider my advantage. While you are pleased to get knowledge and
culture in many ways, I am delighted to think that I am getting rid of
them. I have never got over my surprise that I should have been born
into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of
time, too. [Journal,
5 December 1856]
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The
savage lives simply through ignorance and idleness or laziness, but
the philosopher lives simply through wisdom. [Journal, 1
September 1853]
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To what
end do I lead a simple life at all, pray? That I may teach others to
simplify their lives?—and so all our lives be simplified
merely, like an algebraic formula? Or not, rather, that I may make
use of the ground I have cleared to live more worthily and
profitably? [Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 26 September 1855]
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Simplicity is the
law of nature for men as well as for flowers. [Journal, 29
February 1852]
A
Note on the Text:
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Source:
Unless otherwise noted, quotations are from The Writings of Henry
David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906)
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