Walden or Life in the Woods

by Henry David Thoreau

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of.

Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in.

It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.

Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures,

I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.

What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man?

a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a trifling cost.

With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.

I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf,

Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of.

and I think that it is, though only the wise improve

their advantages

“had not made it movable, by which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided”;

men have become the tools of their tools.

But to make haste to my own experiment.

The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.

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

man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.

But I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.

would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.

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,

Maybe the inspiration for Reagan 's famous quote about the State coming to help?

Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music,

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.

After a night’s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. “Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe”—and he reads it over his coffee

My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills.

I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel.

whip-poor-will

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.

I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period in my life; I mean that I had some.

my company was winnowed by my mere distance from town.

MY BEANS, THE LENGTH OF WHOSE ROWS, ADDED TOGETHER, was seven miles already planted,

but in the course of the summer it appeared by the arrowheads which I turned up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelt here and planted

corn and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and so, to some extent, had exhausted the soil for this very crop.

Every day or two I strolled to the village

was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again.

My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?

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.

The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially.

believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind.