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. He should have gone up garret at once.
—WaldenThis stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort, or boneset, to my intellect. This is what I go out to seek.
—Journal, 7 January 1857Those 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.
—WaldenThose who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript.
—WaldenThose 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.
—WaldenThough I write every day yet when I say a good thing, it seems as it I wrote but rarely.
—Journal, 28 February 1841Though the city is no more attractive to me than ever yet I see less difference between a city & and some dismallest swamp than formerly. It is a swamp too dismal & dreary even for me.
—Journal, 29 July 1850Though the speech of the poet goes to the heart of things, yet he is that one especially who speaks civilly to Nature as a second person and in some sense is the patron of the world.
—Journal, 30 November 1841Thus a man shall lead his life away from here on the edge of the wilderness, in Indian Millinocket stream, in a new world, far in the dark of a continent, and have a flute to play at evening here, while his strains echo to the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live, as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man.
—The Maine WoodsTime 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. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one.
—WaldenTo a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
—WaldenÂTo 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.
—WaldenTo be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
—WaldenTo die is not to begin to die, and continue; it is not a state of continuance, but of transientness; but to live is a condition of continuance, and does not mean to be born merely. There is no continuance of death.
—Journal, 12 March 1842To live in relations of truth and sincerity with men is to dwell in a frontier country.
—Journal, 12 January 1852To me there is something devilish in manners. The best manners is nakedness of manners.
—Journal, 31 January 1852To one we love we are related as to nature in the spring. Our dreams are mutually intelligible. We take the census, and find that there is one.
—Journal, 30 April 1851