Walden

by Henry David Thoreau

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.

One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period.

Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?

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

I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer.

Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.

Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one

I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary.

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 best books are not read even by those who are called good readers.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!

I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity.

With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole.

Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.

Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher’s desk.

Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.

he had to work hard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard he had to eat hard again to repair the waste of his system

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 eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance.

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions.

What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed.

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.

We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty.

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

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

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.

Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.

As if one were to begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth to practise Christian meekness and charity with goodness aforethought!

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries.