But education ordinarily so called – the learning of trades and professions which is designed to enable men to earn their living, or to fit them for a particular station in life- is servile.
—Journal, 8 December 1859But it is not so easy a thing to sympathize with another, though you may have the best disposition to do it.
—Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 1 January 1859But let us hear a strain of music, we are at once advertised of a life which no man had told us of, which no preacher preaches. Suppose I try to describe faithfully the prospect which a strain of music exhibits to me. The field of my life becomes a boundless plain, glorious to tread, with no death nor disappointment at the end of it. All meanness and trivialness disappear. I become adequate to any deed. No particulars survive this expansion; persons do not survive it. In the light of this strain there is no thou nor I. We are actually lifted above ourselves.
—Journal, 15 January 1857But most men do not know what a house is, and the mass are actually poor all their days because they think they must have such an one as their neighbor’s.
—Journal, 23 August 1845But some express themselves chiefly by their gait and carriage, with swelling breasts or elephantine roll and elevated brows, making themselves moving and adequate signs of themselves, having no other outlet.
—Journal, 21 August 1852But such only as spring heavenward, and I may catch from steeples and hilltops in their upward course, which are the more refined parts of the former, are the true sphere music,—pure, unmixed music,—in which no wail mingles.
—Journal, 8 July 1838But this hunting of the moose merely for the satisfaction of killing him—not even for the sake of his hide—without making any extraordinary exertion or running any risk to yourself, is too much like going out by night to some wood-side pasture and shooting your neighbor’s horses.
—The Maine WoodsBut 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 1855Buy a farm! What have I to pay for a farm which a farmer will take?
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversÂBy 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.
—WaldenBy my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.
—Journal, 26 July 1851By the quality of a man’s writing, by the elevation of its tone, you may measure his self-respect.
—Journal, 4 September 1851Can I not by expectation affect the revolutions of nature—make a day to bring forth something new?
—Journal, 18 April 1852Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? Learn to split wood, at least.
—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversCarlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe.
—Journal, 13 September 1852Character is Genius settled. It can maintain itself against the world, and if it relapses it repents. It is as a dog set to watch the property of Genius. Genius, strictly speaking, is not responsible, for it is not moral.
—Journal, 2 March 1842Circumstances are not rigid and unyielding, but our habits are rigid.
—Thoreau to H. G. O. Blake, 17 March 1848Communicating with the villas and hills and forests on either hand, by the glances we sent them, or the echoes we awakened.
—Journal, 1837-1847Compliments and flattery oftenest excite my contempt by the pretension they imply, for who is he that assumes to flatter me? To compliment often implies an assumption of superiority in the complimenter. It is, in fact, a subtle detraction.
—Journal, 27 March 1857