Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts “All aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over—and it will be called, and will be, “A melancholy accident.”
—WaldenMen have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer.
—Journal, 14 July 1845Men invite the devil in at every angle and then prate about the garden of Eden and the fall of man.
—Journal, 5 November 1855Men should not go to New Zealand to write or think of Greece and Rome, nor more to New England. New earths, new themes expect us. Celebrate not the Garden of Eden, but your own.
—Journal, 22 October 1857Men should not labor foolishly like brutes, but the brain and the body should always, or as much as possible, work and rest together.
—Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 2 May 1848Men talk to me about society as if I had none and they had some, as if it were only to be got by going to the sociable or to Boston.
—Journal, 27 March 1857Men talk of freedom! How many are free to think? free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice?
—Journal, 6 May 1858Men think that 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.
—WaldenMen will pay something to look into a travelling showman’s box but not to look upon the fairest prospects on the earth.
—Journal, 25 May 1851Men write in a florid style only because they would match the simple beauties of the plainest speech. They prefer to be misunderstood, rather than come short of its exuberance.
—Journal, 23 March 1842Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be born, but to be still-born, rather.
—"Life without Principle"Methinks every swamp tends to have or suggests such an interior tender spot.
—Journal, 31 May 1857Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual.
—"Natural History of Massachusetts"Methinks my present experience is nothing; my past experience is all in all. I think that no experience which I have to-day comes up to, or is comparable with, the experience of my boyhood.
—Journal, 16 July 1851Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators.
—WaldenMorning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer’s requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world.
—WaldenMost events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversMost men can keep a horse or keep up a certain fashionable style of living, but few indeed can keep up great expectations.
—Journal, 6 May 1858