Favourite Selections From
his Writings:
I have lived some 30 years
on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even
earnest advice from my seniors…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. (Walden
- ‘Economy)
There are a thousand
hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may
be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is
doing most by his mode of life to produce the misery which he strives in vain to relieve. (ibid)
The mass of men lead lives
of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. (ibid)
As long as possible live
free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed
to a farm or the county jail.
(Walden –‘Where I lived, and What I Lived
For)
A man is rich in proportion
to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
(ibid)
However intense my
experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me which
- as it were - is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but
taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may
be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of
fiction, a work of imagination only, so far as he was concerned. (Walden
– ‘Solitude’)
Society is commonly too
cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new
value for each other. (ibid)
Love virtue, and the people
will be virtuous. The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues
of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it,
bends. (Walden
–‘The Village’)
My God Genius seemed to say
“Go fish and hunt for a while by day – farther and wider – and rest thee by
many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy creator in the
days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn and seek adventures. Let
the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at
home.” There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may be
here played…Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and
faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like
serfs…. Men come home tamely at night only from the next field or street, where
their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own
life over again; their shadows morning and evening reach farther than their
daily steps. We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and
discoveries each day, with new experience and character. (Walden – ‘Baker Farm’)
I found in myself, and
still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as
do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I
reverence them both. (Walden
– ‘Higher Laws’)
“That in which men differ
from brute beasts” says Mencius, “is a thing very inconsiderable; the common
herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully…. A command over our
passions, and over the external senses of the body, are declared by the Vedic
to the mind’s approximation of God.” (ibid)
Chastity is the flowering
of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism and Holiness are but the various
fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is
open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is
blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the
Divine is being established.- - -All sensuality is one, though it take many
forms; all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or
cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see
a man do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is…Every man
is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a
style purely his own - - - we are all sculptors and painters, and our material
is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a
man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them. (ibid)
Why do you stay here and
live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you?
These same stars twinkle over other fields than these. – But how to come out of
this condition and actually migrate thither? Practice some new austerity, let
your mind descend into your body and redeem it, and treat yourself with ever
increasing respect. (ibid)
My visitor was a true
friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress. An Old Mortality, say
rather an Immortality, with unwearied patience and faith making plain the image
en-graven in men’s bodies – the God of whom they are but defaced and leaning
monuments. (Walden – ‘Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors)
Our human life but dies
down to its root, and like grass puts forth its green blade to eternity. (Walden –
‘Spring’)
As every season seems best
to us in its turn, so the coming of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out
of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age…A single gentle rain makes the
grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better
thoughts. 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.
(ibid)
I left the woods for as
good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more
lives to live, and could not spend any more time on this one.
(Walden – ‘Conclusion’)
If you would learn to speak
all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel
farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx
to dash her head against a stone, ever obey the old philosopher, and Explore
Thyself.
(ibid)
Let them wander and
scrutinize the outlandish Australians. I have more of God, they more of the
road. (ibid)
The surface of the earth is
soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind
travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep
the ruts of tradition and conformity. (ibid)
If one advances confidently
in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life he has
imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put
some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal and more
liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the
old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal
sense, and he will live with the licence of a higher order of beings. In
proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less
complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness
weakness. (ibid)
A living dog is better than
a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of
pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let everyone mind his own
business and endeavour to be what he was made. (ibid)
Why should we be in such
desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his
companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer: Let him step to
the music which he hears, however measured or far away…If the condition of
things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can
substitute. We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. (ibid)
The ways by which you may
get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by
which you earn money MERELY is to have been truly idle or worse. If the
labourer gets no more than his employer pays him, he is cheated; he cheats
himself. (Life
Without Principle)
As I do not need
meaningless labour to regulate me, I prefer to finish my education at a
different school. (ibid)
How can one be a wise man, if
he does not know any better how to live than other men? If he is no more
cunning and intellectually subtle? Is there any such thing as Wisdom not
applied to life? Is she merely the miller who grinds the finest logic? (ibid)
In proportion as our inward
life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. (ibid)
It requires more than a
day’s devotion to know and possess the wealth of a day. (ibid)
Really to see the sun rise
or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would
preserve us forever. (ibid)
We are provincial, because
we do not find at home our standards; because we do not worship ‘truth’ but the
reflection of truth; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive
devotion to trade and commerce, which are but means and not the end. (ibid)
As a snowdrift is formed
where there is a lull in the wind, so where there is a lull of truth, an
institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and
at length blows it down. (ibid)
It is the living spirit of
the pine tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which I sympathize, and which
heals my cuts. It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a
heaven, there to tower above me still. (The
Maine Woods)
It is not enough to be
busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about? (The Journal)
One can learn more about
oneself in a sleepless night, than by a trip to Europe.
(ibid)
A broad margin of leisure
is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste no less in life
than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of
the railroad cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely
lived to moments of divine leisure, in which your life is coincident with the
life of the universe. We live too fast and coarsely, just as we eat too fast,
and do not know the true savour of our food. We consult our will and our
understanding and the expectation of men, not our genius. I can impose upon
myself tasks which will crush me for life and prevent all expansion, and this I
am but too inclined to do. Our moment of life costs many hours, hours not of
business, but of preparation and invitation. Yet the man who does not betake
himself at once to sawing is called a loafer, though he may be knocking on the
doors of heaven all the while, which will surely be opened to him. That aim in
life is highest which requires the highest and finest discipline. How much,
what infinite leisure it requires, as of a lifetime, to appreciate a single
phenomenon! You must camp down beside it as for life, having reached your land
of promise, and give yourself wholly to it. (ibid)
It has been written that we
are no greater than our dreams. Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.
I lived in Judea eighteen
hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among
my contemporaries. (Letters)
His fishing was not a
sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and
withdrawal from the world; just as the aged read their Bibles.
(A
Week on The Concord and Merrimack Rivers)
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