Walden

Not about leaving society but finding humanity.

Speaking of wisdom

Most men, even in this compartively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superflously coarse labors of life, that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.

How can he remember well his ignorance — which his growth requires — who has so often to use his knowledge?

What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

As if you could kill time without inuring eternity.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam.

We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests.

If I repent anything, it is very like yo be my good behavior.

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.

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.

Speaking of clothes

I am sure there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched, clothes than to have a sound consience.

It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon.

For he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as if I were a peg to hang the coat on?

In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

Speaking of property

The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live.

The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself.

He has set his trap with a hair springe to catch comfort and indepdenence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it.

If the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should we have a better dwelling than the former?

Men have become tools of their tools.

Let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they come in contact with our lives.

No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.

It is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque.

They are but improved means to an unimproved end, and end which it was already but too easy to arrive at.

This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a quesitonable liberty during the least valuable part of it.

I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say.

If I have got to drag my trap, I will take care that it be a light one and do not nip me in a vital part. But perchance it would be wisest never to put one's paw into it.

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.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

Speaking of life

As long as possible live free and uncomitted.

Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.

I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the ssential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.

I want to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it.

As for work, we haven't any of consequence.

We think that that is which appears to be.

Speaking of books

This only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tiptoe to read and dvote our most alert and wakeful hours to.

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

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure — if they are indeed so well off — to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.