Walden

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.

trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another’s brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other’s brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent;

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

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.

Hubris

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter.

the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

The man who has actually paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point to him.

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them.

The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves.

Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners?

The neighbors eagerly collected to view them, bought them all, and carefully transported them to their garrets and dust holes, to lie there till their estates are settled, when they will start again.

I found that, by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living.

As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure.

my greatest skill has been to want but little—so

to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely;

I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I 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.

the man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.

You must have a genius for charity as well as for anything else.

I would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him who does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life, I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will.

Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune.

To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life—I wrote this some years ago—that were worth the postage.

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art.

The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

ennui.

The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.

They who come rarely to the woods take some little piece of the forest into their hands to play with by the way, which they leave, either intentionally or accidentally.

I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.

One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward the north star.