Walden in 100+ Books in 2025

Jan 13, 2009 Dolly rated it really liked it

Shelves: religion-philosophy, 2011, books-for-living-end-of-your-life, new-england, cooking-recipes, russia, nonfiction, native-american

Finally! I have finished this book. It's been on my to-read and currently-reading lists for so long, I was beginning to think I would never finish it. This time, however, I persisted. And although I read it very slowly (usually only about 4-10 pages per day), I enjoyed the narrative written so long ago.

I appreciated the transcendentalist nature of the book and the calling for a more simple life. I enjoyed his descriptions of his bare existence in the woods, but more as a spectator - there are a Finally! I have finished this book. It's been on my to-read and currently-reading lists for so long, I was beginning to think I would never finish it. This time, however, I persisted. And although I read it very slowly (usually only about 4-10 pages per day), I enjoyed the narrative written so long ago.

I appreciated the transcendentalist nature of the book and the calling for a more simple life. I enjoyed his descriptions of his bare existence in the woods, but more as a spectator - there are a few modern luxuries that I would loathe to be without (hot, running water for one.)

I am not sure that I have anything more to say about this book than what has already been written in these reviews, but I would like to share the interesting quotations I've pulled from the book:

"I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience." (p. 3)

"To 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." (p. 11)

"No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes: yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience." (p. 15)

"Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again." (p. 62)

"To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning." (p. 63)

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." (p. 63)

"Our life is frittered away by detail." (p. 64)

"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?" (p. 65)

"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea." (pp. 65-66)

"God Himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us." (p. 67)

"Time 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." (p. 68)

"We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were." (p. 74)

"This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disc cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another." (pp. 91-92)

"I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where osme have got more than is sufficient, while others have not enough." (p. 118) [perhaps a call for some sort of socialism?]

"No humane being past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does." (p. 144)

"Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eathing each other when they came in contact with the more civilised." (p. 147)

"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads." (p. 192)

"The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit - not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic." (p. 209)

"When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the winter...those unexhausted granaries which entertain the earliest birds - decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears." (pp. 209-210)

"So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity." (p. 211)

"In a pleasant Spring morning all men's sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return." (p. 213)

"I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey onone another; that tender organisations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp - tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it." (p. 215)

"It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves...How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world - how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now." (p. 219)

"I learned this at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." (p. 219)

"While England endeavours to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?" (p. 220)

"Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pigmies, and not be the biggest pigmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavour to be what he was made." (p. 221)

"However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace." (p. 222)

new words: radicle, esculents, dross, sinecure, integument, liber, apotheosized, retinue, simoom, umbrageous, conventicle, cimeter, umbels, tantivy, ammiral, threnodies, usnea, festal, subtile, mullein, repastination, dungings, succedaneous, carytids, cosmogonal, horned pout, verdure, vitreous, potamogetons, pellucid, sward, selvage, fluviatile, ebriosity, moiling, victualling, fictile, stirp, vulpine cynosure, periplus, acanthus, foliacious, tafferel, exoteric, ferule, kittlybenders, pellicle, alburnum ...more

Like · see review

Dec 07, 2009 Chrystal rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, escuela, read-in-2009

Ehhh...Walden is genius because Thoreau is a genius. Almost too genius.

Like · see review

Nov 27, 2009 Angela Randall marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: free-ebook, we-own, non-fiction, classics, young-adult-educational-material, i-own, literature, philosophy, essential-reading, skills-diy-outdoors

Free audiobook available here. ...more

Like · see review