But what is the use in trying to live simply, raising what you eat, making what you wear, building what you inhabit, burning what you cut or dig, when those to whom you are allied insanely want and will have a thousand other things which neither you nor they can raise and nobody else, perchance, will pay for?—Journal, 5 November 1855
Buy a farm! What have I to pay for a farm which a farmer will take?—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers 
By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.—Walden
Farms are for sale all around here—and so I suppose men are for purchase.—Thoreau to John and Cynthia Thoreau, 8 June 1843
Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation.—Walden
How much Nature herself suffers from drought! It seems quite as much as she can do to produce these crops.—Journal, 19 August 1851
I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me that, by the want of pecuniary wealth, I have been nailed down to this my native region so long and steadily, and made to study and love this spot of earth more and more. What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering? The traveler's is but a barren and comfortless condition. Wealth will not buy a man a home in nature-house nor farm there. The man of business does not by his business earn a residence in nature, but is denaturalized rather.—Journal, 12 November 1853
I have faith that the man who redeemed some acres of land the past summer redeemed also some parts of his character.—Journal, 1 March 1852
I sympathize with weeds perhaps more than with the crop they choke, they express so much vigor.—Journal, 24 July 1852
I talked of buying Conantum once but for want of money we did not come to terms—but I have farmed it in my own fashion every year since.—Journal, 31 August 1851
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