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CONTENTS

Walden

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Author: Thoreau H.D. (1817-1862)
Year: n.a.

(Sayings of Thoreau)

Every man looks at his woodpile with a kind of affection.

There was a man in my neighbourhood who lived in a hollow tree. His manners were truly regal.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction... Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe...

Our inventions... are but improved means to unimproved ends.

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

Let every one mind his own business, and endeavour to be what he was made.

The farmer is endeavouring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his shoe-strings he speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair-spring to catch comfort and independence and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it... It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.

Near the end of March 1845, I borrowed an axe, and went down to the woods by Walden pond.

... I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes...

I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

For the most part we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures we suppose a case and put ourselves into it, and hence we are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascertain what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place oneself in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society." He declared that "a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require half so much courage as a foot-pad," – "that honour and religion have never stood in the way of a well-considered and a firm resolve." This was manly, as the world goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A saner man would have found himself often enough "in formal opposition" to what are deemed "the most sacred laws of society," through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his resolution without going out of his way. It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he finds himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.

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