Sunday, November 7, 2021

Kathleen Battle - 5 Japanese Love Songs

https://youtu.be/Noqn1Qo4LFA

Thursday, February 9, 2017

When Civil Disobedience and Resistance Are Justified (1849)

Henry David Thoreau on When Civil Disobedience and Resistance Are Justified (1849)

in Philosophy, Politics| November 15th, 2016

History is rife with examples of oppressive governments. The present is rife with examples of oppressive governments. You can name your own examples. The question that presents itself to any opposition is what is to be done? Go underground? Sabotage? Take up arms? The likelihood of success in such cases—depending on the belligerence of the opposition and the capabilities of the government—varies widely. But I see no moral reason to condemn people for fighting injustice, provided their cause itself is just. Neither, of course, did Henry David Thoreau, author of the 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience,” a document that every student of Political Philosophy 101 knows as an ur-text of modern democratic protest movements.

This is an essay we have become all-too familiar with by reputation rather than by reading. Thoreau’s political philosophy is not passive, as in the phrase “passive resistance.” It is not middle-of-the-road centrism disguised as radicalism. It lies instead at the watering hole where right libertarianism and left anarchism meet to have a drink. “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least,’” wrote Thoreau, and ultimately “’That government is best which governs not at all.’”

Like many utopian theorists of the 19th century, Thoreau saw this as the inevitable future: “when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government they will have.” Thoreau laments all restrictions on trade and regulations on commerce. He also denounces the use of a standing army by “a comparatively… few individuals.” And yet—despite these radical positions—Thoreau has been enshrined in the history of political thought both for his radical tactics and his defense of preserving government, for the present.

“To speak practically and as a citizen,” he wrote, “unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.” He does not go to great lengths, as classical philosophers were wont, to define the ideal government. It is radically democratic, that we know. But as to what constitutes injustice, Thoreau is clear:

When the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.

This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.

The figure he cites of “a sixth of the population” is not erroneous. As W.E.B. Du Bois showed in one of his revolutionary 1900 sociological visualizations, during the time of Thoreau’s essay, one-sixth of the country’s population was indeed comprised of people of African descent, most of them enslaved. Thoreau wrote during debates over the impeding Fugitive Slave Act, a law that put every person of color in the expanding country—free or escaped, in every state and territory—at risk of enslavement or imprisonment without any due process.

Thoreau found both this developing nightmare and the Mexican-American war too intolerably unjust for the country to bear. And he recognized the limitations of elections to resolve them: “All voting is a sort of gaming… with a slight moral tinge to it,” he wrote, then observed with devastating irony, given total disenfranchisement of people who were property, that “Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.”

“Unjust laws exist,” writes Thoreau, “I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.” Thoreau had put his dicta into practice already many years before. He had stopped paying his poll tax in 1842 to protest the war and the expansion of slavery. He was finally arrested and jailed for the offense in 1846. The incident hardly sparked a movement. He was bailed out, perhaps by his aunt, the following day. And as we well know, the Mexican-American war and the crisis of slavery were both resolved with… war.

But Thoreau used his experience as the basis for “Civil Disobedience,” which he wrote to a local audience in his home state of Massachusetts, and which went on to directly inspire the massively successful, national grassroots movements of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other non-violent Human Rights and Anti-War leaders around the world. So what did he recommend dissenters do? Here are the basics of his prescriptions, with his words in quotes:

“I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts.” Thoreau then goes on to describe his particular form of resistance, the non-payment of tax. His thesis here, however, allows for any just refusals to recognize government authority.

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison.” Thoreau himself suffered little, it’s true, but millions who came after him—dissidents on all continents save Antarctica—have endured imprisonment, beating, and death. “Suppose blood should flow,” writes Thoreau, “Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded?” As for the justness of disobedience, Thoreau makes a very logical case: “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”

Thoreau goes on to introduce a good deal of nuance into the argument, writing that community taxes supporting highways and schools are ethical, but those supporting unjust war and enslavement are not. He recommends discerning, thoughtful action. And he expected that the poor would undertake most of the resistance, because the burdens fell heaviest on them, and “because they who assert the purest right, and consequently are the most dangerous to a corrupt State, commonly have not spent much time in accumulating property.” This has generally, throughout history, been true.

The best thing a person of means can do, he writes, is “to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor.” Or, presumably, if one has never been so, to follow the poors’ lead. The paradox of Thoreau’s assertion that the least powerful present the greatest threat to the State resolves in his recognition that the State’s power rests not in its appeal to “sense, intellectual or moral” but in its “superior physical strength.” By simply refusing to yield to threats, anyone—even ordinary, powerless people—can deny the government’s authority, “until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.”

Read Thoreau’s complete essay, “Civil Disobedience,” here.

Hear 21 Hours of Lectures & Talks by Howard Zinn, Author of the Bestselling A People’s History of the United States

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Source: http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/henry-david-thoreau-on-when-civil-disobedience-resistance-can-be-considered-just-1849.html

Sunday, January 5, 2014

'Walden' Quotes

Henry David Thoreau's Famous Nonfiction Classic

By Esther Lombardi

Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems

Library of America

See More About

Henry David Thoreau's Walden was published in 1854. The essay details the experiment in personal independence and self-reliance that Thoreau underwent, starting on July 4, 1845. Here are a few famous quotations from the essay:

"Let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world." - Henry David Thoreau, 1. Economy, Walden
"I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust." - Henry David Thoreau, 1. Economy, Walden
"In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line." - Henry David Thoreau, 1. Economy, Walden
"I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion." - Henry David Thoreau, 1. Economy, Walden
"To be awake is to be alive." - Henry David Thoreau, 2. Where I Lived and What I Lived For, Walden
"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." - Henry David Thoreau, 2. Where I Lived and What I Lived For, Walden
"I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born." - Henry David Thoreau, 2. Where I Lived and What I Lived For, Walden
I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls." - Henry David Thoreau, 5. Solitude, Walden
"A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." - Henry David Thoreau, 9. The Ponds, Walden
"You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns." - Henry David Thoreau, 12. Brute Neighbors, Walden
"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." - Henry David Thoreau, 18. Conclusion, Walden
"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." - Henry David Thoreau, 18. Conclusion, Walden
"However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names." - Henry David Thoreau, 18. Conclusion, Walden

Link: http://classiclit.about.com/od/waldenhdthoreau/a/aa_waldenquote.htm

Walden' Review

By Katharine Swan

Walden was published around 1854, during the reign of the transcendentalists; in fact, Henry David Thoreau, the book's author, was a member of the movement. If transcendentalism were around today, we would probably call its followers: new-age folk, hippies, or nonconformists.

In fact, much of what transcendentalism stood for back then is still alive and well today.

Many people know Thoreau from his 1849 essay "Resistance to Civil Government," better known as "Civil Disobedience." During the 1840s, Thoreau was imprisoned for refusing to pay taxes for a cause he didn’t agree with. (In those days, taxes were collected separately by tax collectors who came to your door, as opposed to the modern income tax.) Although a friend of his paid the tax for him, enabling him to be released from jail, Thoreau maintained in his essay that he had no obligation to support an action of government that he did not agree with.

Walden is written in much the same spirit. Thoreau cared as little for society's ills as he did for the government. He firmly believed that most of life's expenses were unnecessary, and therefore so too was the labor a man put into earning enough money to buy them. In order to prove his claims, he "went into the woods" and lived as simply and as inexpensively as he encouraged others to do. Walden is the written record of his experiment.

The Experiment: Walden

The first several chapters of Walden are the most interesting, as it is in these that Thoreau lays out his case. His sarcasm and wit amuses the reader as he rails against the frivolity of new clothes, expensive houses, polite company, and meaty diets.

One of Thoreau's chief arguments in Walden is that men wouldn't have to work for a living (and Thoreau clearly detests work) if they lived more simply. To that end, Thoreau built a house for under thirty dollars during a time when the average house (according to the first chapter of Walden) cost around $800, bought one cheap suit of clothes, and planted a crop of beans.

For two years Thoreau lived in that house. He spend time cultivating his beans and other crops, making bread, and fishing. With his house paid for and his food in good supply, he swam in Walden Pond, walked in the adjoining woods, wrote, daydreamed, reflected, and – rarely – visited the town.

The Real Story: Walden

Of course, Thoreau fails to point out an important element of his situation. He moved to Walden Pond because Ralph Waldo Emerson (one of his good friends and fellow transcendentalist writers) owned Walden Pond and the surrounding land. In a different situation, Thoreau's experiment might have been cut short.

Even so, Walden is a valuable lesson for readers. If you are anything like me, you'll read the book while sitting in a comfortable chair, and wearing fashionable clothes. You probably have a job to pay for all these things, and you may even complain about said job from time to time. If that sounds like you, you'll probably drink up Thoreau's words. You may wish that you could free yourself from society's constraints.

Study Guide

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Henry David Thoreau Quotes: Read The Best

Henry David Thoreau Quotes

If you already meditate or plan to try the easy meditation techniques you'll find these Henry David Thoreau Quotes a real help.
He lived in the late nineteenth century. And became a well-know philosopher, environmentalist and meditator.
He's inspired Ghandi, Tolstoy - modern meditation teachers like Jon Kabat-Zinn.... and maybe You.
But what was his message?
Can he show you ways to deal with stress in your life?
Find out here.. (click to scroll down page).

Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Live simply

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify
I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand. Instead of a million count half a dozen.
In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the thousand and one items to be allowed for, a man who survives must indeed be a great calculator.
Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes , five and reduce other things in proportion.
Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Live in the present moment

Only the day dawns to which we are awake
In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all ages.

Don't rush

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence. That petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine tomorrow.

How to Live

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation.
If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings why should we run?
Be it life or death we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities. If we are alive let us go about our business.
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts.

The Value of Meditation

Direct your eye right inward and you'll find a thousand regions in your mind yet undiscovered. Travel them a be an expert in home cosmography

Nature, Solitude and Happiness

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature, and has his senses still
I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature. In the very pattering of the drops. In very sound and sight around my house, an infinite an unaccountable friendliness all at once like at atmosphere sustaining me.

Meditation Tip: Try going out in nature. To your local park or wood - whatever's nearby. Then allow yourself to stop. Listen, Look at what's around you. Next bring your attention to your breathing, body or to walking itself.
I've explained how to do this in these free guided meditation scripts...

Thoreau's Final Words

On his death-bed Thoreau was asked by friends if he had made his peace with God. He repliedâ€¦
"I did not know we had ever quarrelled."

Enjoy the Henry David Thoreau Quotes?

...Read more inspirational quotes on meditation

Meditation Quotes - Stories and Parables for Meditators.
Meditation Quotes 12 of The Best
Best Life Quotes
Tao QuotesInspiration for Life
Tao Quotes The Art of Effortless Effort
Zen Quotes - Why Don't They Make Sense?
Buddhism Quotes - For a Modern World
Healing Quotes.

Or why not share YOUR Favourite Meditation Quote or story.

Return from Henry David Thoreau Quotes to Meditation Quotes Return from Henry David Thoreau Quotes to Learning Modern Meditation Home
Where to Find out More About Thoreau...
You can read about Thoreau's 2 year retreat to the countryside in Walden: A Life in the Woods. Dover Publications.

Photo at top of page by nicholas_t

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Henry David Thoreau Quotes: Read The Best

Walden by Henry David Thoreau: Chapter 18 - The Literature Page

To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buckeye does not grow in New England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here. The wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace with the seasons cropping the pastures of the Colorado only till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet we think that if rail fences are pulled down, and stone walls piled up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer: but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless. The universe is wider than our views of it.

Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum. The other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not the game he would be after. How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot one's self.--

"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
            A thousand regions in your mind
            Yet undiscovered.  Travel them, and be
            Expert in home-cosmography."

Walden by Henry David Thoreau: Chapter 18 - The Literature Page

Walden by Henry David Thoreau CliffsNotes - Study Guide and Help

Walden By Henry David Thoreau About Walden

In some editions of Walden, there is included an inscription page which precedes the first chapter. On this page, the narrator of Walden declares:

I DO NOT PROPOSE TO WRITE AN ODE TO DEJECTION, BUT TO BRAG AS LUSTILY AS CHANTICLEER IN THE MORNING, STANDING ON HIS ROOST, IF ONLY TO WAKE MY NEIGHBORS UP.

The reader attempting to approach an understanding and appreciation of Walden should immediately note that here, in this inscription, the germ of the book may be found.

The tone is one of great confidence and joy; the pages to follow will be the narrator's optimistic proclamation of the richness and fullness of his life at Walden Pond.

He will brag lustily, with a full-throated voice, that he, like the rooster that greets the dawn, has successfully created a way of living that has enabled him to find a "new day" in his life.

It is a new world and a new self that he has discovered through his thought and activity at his woodland retreat. He feels as though he has been reborn into a fresh and new, more satisfying life; he celebrates the feeling of having left behind his old self, the spiritually asleep creature made lifeless by "the dead dry life of society," for the sake of a new and ecstatic spiritual life.

In light of what has been said about Thoreau's transcendentalism, one might rightly expect Walden to begin on just such a note of buoyancy and high-spiritedness.

This is a fitting way to begin the artistic depiction of how one man moved away from the state of being a "god in ruins" and moved toward a god-like state of fulfillment.

Thus commences one of the most sophisticated and artistic "brags" in the history of American literature. And before the student decides to term the book the work of a rabid egomaniac, a further word about the nature of this "brag" should be offered.

In "The American Scholar," Emerson described the three basic stages of a transcendentalist's life: first, he learns all that is of merit in the wisdom of the past; second, he establishes a harmonious relationship with nature through which he is able to discover ethical truths and communicate with the divine.

With these two stages, the transcendentalist has developed his higher faculties; he has cultivated his life and "spiritualized" it. (We see the narrator of Walden go through these two stages in his progress toward spiritual rebirth.) After thus cultivating his own spirit, the transcendentalist does not selfishly remain content with himself.

The third stage he must attempt, after self-renewal, is the renewal of society-at-large. After being nurtured by books and nature, he must attempt to share his spiritual gains with other men who have not yet achieved their perfect spiritual states.

Walden may be viewed as Thoreau's attempt at this third stage in the transcendental life. In it, we hear the "bragging" narrator reiterating the firm conviction that all men may achieve the exhilaration that he feels. He vividly shows us his life; he "brags" of his achievement; and he tries by his example to renew "the dead dry life of society."

Thus, when the narrator "brags," it is not only for himself but for all humanity's potential for greatness.

Like the other transcendentalists, Thoreau was a strong moralist, and one of the most distinctive characteristics of Walden is that the narrator consistently tries to alert his readers to their potential for spiritual growth.

So, while the narrator may crow loudly, sometimes proudly strutting about, and may boast of his "clear flame" with a degree of pride approaching hubris, it should not be forgotten that his self-pride is to be shared by his readers.

If the narrator sometimes seems smug and self-righteous, it must be recalled that he is crowing "to wake his neighbors up" to their own greatness, not just his own.

The narrator's celebration of life and his call for all men to recognize the potential magnificence of life form the core idea, or unifying theme, of Walden. This point cannot be stressed too strongly because, for over a century, many individuals — sometimes very intelligent ones — have tended to ignore this centrally significant fact and have chosen to view Walden in other ways.

While one considers the different aspects of Walden, these aspects should not obscure the essential core of the book: the process by which the narrator moves toward spiritual fulfillment.

The way in which the reader can keep this core foremost in his mind is to approach Walden as what it primarily is: a carefully contrived, closely-knit work of art with a poetic structure designed to support and restate the core idea.

This may easily be done if the reader predisposes himself to two facts. The first is that, before anything else, Thoreau was an artist — an artist above and beyond being a devotee of nature, a naturalist, an economist, an anarchist, an abolitionist, or a philosopher. Since the 1930s, this is the key fact about Thoreau that has been established by scholars, and it has been the key factor in Thoreau's rise to prominence in American letters.

Walden is the product of a man possessed with the idea of creating a great book. The second fact is that Walden was Thoreau's most successful attempt at creating art, to the degree that Walden exhibits the qualities of a great poem.

If one traces the process by which Thoreau transformed his first version of Walden into the final version (this may be done by consulting J. Lyndon Shanley's The Making of Walden), he can see the work being changed from a rough report on pond-side living to a highly compressed, complex, and symbolic work of art.

Of course, one can grasp the central theme of Walden without taking too much note of the poetic structure of the work. If one takes the attitude that one critic has — that "Walden is a collection of eighteen essays recounting Thoreau's experience at Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, from July 4, 1845, to September 6, 1847" — it would still be possible to come to the theme of Walden.

But to view the work as merely a collection of essays is to miss the rich texture that Thoreau gave the work as a whole. The organic, poetic unity, and the rich symbolic structure which Thoreau created in Walden is what makes it a work far superior to his other works which present almost identical themes.

And it is only by being aware of the symbolic structure that one can discover how the fiction of Thoreau's Walden is ultimately autobiographical. It is through the symbolism that one comes to see that Walden is Thoreau's artistic projection of his most deeply felt shortcomings and needs — psychological needs that are fulfilled in the fiction that Thoreau's narrator lives.

The term "fiction" is used here to describe the narrator's record of what happened to him at Walden Pond. Both the "I" voice of the narrator and the world he describes must be distinguished from the real Thoreau and the world that he inhabited while writing Walden. Walden is a fiction, an imaginative creation; it is not a strict "autobiography" in the sense that we usually assign to that word.

The "I" voice we hear bragging "as lustily as chanticleer in the morning" is Thoreau's representation of himself in 1854, as he would like to be, as he hopes to be someday.

Or, it is an older Thoreau's representation of the ecstasy that he felt when he was younger. In writing Walden, he is seeking to assert and perhaps recapture his former happiness.

It should never be forgotten that seven years separated the actual experience at Walden Pond and the publication of Walden. As many critics have contended, those seven years witnessed Thoreau's loss of the intense inspiration and the ecstasy in nature that characterized his youth.

In 1854, Thoreau was looking backward to his years of spiritual fulfillment before his highly subjective idealism had begun to wane. And he is hopefully looking forward to regaining it.

In short, Walden is a kind of wish book. With the "I" voice of Walden, Thoreau fabricates an ideal alter-ego, a wish-fulfillment figure, a character who is able to say the things about himself that Thoreau would like to be able to claim.

In his youth, Thoreau felt a terrific sense of inspiration and wholeness whenever he was in the presence of nature. He believed that he had empirically proven the tenet of Emersonian idealism that the divine may be experienced through the medium of nature.

In fact, Thoreau was so excited, so exhilarated by his sensual and spiritual experience of nature that he seriously entertained the idea that nature is actually God.

He went past Emerson, who declared that nature is the symbol of the spiritual, and proposed that it is more than a mere symbol. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau's idealism surpassed Emerson's when he wrote:

May we not see God? Are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with mere allegory? Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?

Statements such as this caused Reverend George Ripley to denounce Thoreau's "pantheism." Nature fulfilled him to such a degree that he had to celebrate it as divine; so great was the physical and spiritual harmony between him and nature that he felt he was experiencing divinity. And it was to this state that he wanted to return in 1854.

Hence, at the climax of the narrator's quest for harmony with nature in the "Spring" chapter, we find the "I" voice experiencing nature's expression of the divine.

The ecstasy that the "I" voice brags of in this chapter is the ecstasy that Thoreau longs for. The spiritual rebirth that the narrator achieves in Walden is the goal toward which Thoreau was attempting to design his life in 1854.

Source:
Walden by Henry David Thoreau CliffsNotes - Study Guide and Help

http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/literature/walden/about.html

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Walden Audiobook by Henry David Thoreau (Ch 01) - YouTube

Part 1 - Walden Audiobook by Henry David Thoreau (Ch 01) - YouTube

Part 1. Classic Literature VideoBook with synchronized text, interactive transcript, and closed captions in multiple languages. Audio courtesy of Librivox. Read by Gord Mackenzie.

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Part 2 - Walden Audiobook by Henry David Thoreau (Chs 02-04)

Part 2. Classic Literature VideoBook with synchronized text, interactive transcript, and closed captions in multiple languages. Audio courtesy of Librivox. Read by Gord Mackenzie.

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Walden free audiobook at Librivox: http://librivox.org/walden-by-henry-david-thoreau/

Walden free eBook at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/205

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Monday, October 1, 2012

John Muir - Biography

John Muir: Biography

John Muir - farmer, inventor, sheepherder, naturalist, explorer, writer, and conservationist - was born on April 21, 1838 in Dunbar, Scotland. Until the age of eleven he attended the local schools of that small coastal town. In 1849, the Muir family emigrated to the United States, settling first at Fountain Lake and then moving to Hickory Hill Farm near Portage, Wisconsin, see The Story of My Boyhood & Youth

Muir's father was a harsh disciplinarian and worked his family from dawn to dusk. Whenever they were allowed a short period away from the plow and hoe, Muir and his younger brother would roam the fields and woods of the rich Wisconsin countryside. John became more and more the loving observer of the natural world. He also became an inventor, a carver of curious but practical mechanisms in wood. He made clocks that kept accurate time and created a wondrous device that tipped him out of bed before dawn.

In 1860, Muir took his inventions to the state fair at Madison, Wisconsin where he won admiration and prizes. Also that year he entered the University of Wisconsin. He made fine grades, but after three years left Madison to travel the northern United States and Canada, odd-jobbing his way through the yet unspoiled land.

In 1867, while working at a carriage parts shop in Indianapolis, Muir suffered a blinding eye injury that would change his life. When he regained his sight one month later, Muir resolved to turn his eyes to the fields and woods. There began his years of wanderlust. He walked a thousand miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico. He sailed to Cuba , and later to Panama, where he crossed the Isthmus and sailed up the West Coast, landing in San Francisco in March, 1868. From that moment on, though he would travel around the world, California became his home.

It was California's Sierra Nevada and Yosemite that truly claimed him. In 1868, he walked across the San Joaquin Valley through waist-high wildflowers and into the high country for the first time. Later he would write: "Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light...the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain chains I have ever seen." He herded sheep through that first summer and made his home in Yosemite.

By 1871 he had found living glaciers in he Sierra and had conceived his controversial theory of the glaciation of Yosemite Valley. He began to be known throughout the country. Famous men of the time - Joseph LeConte, Asa Gray and Ralph Waldo Emerson - made their way to the door of his pine cabin.

Beginning in 1874, a series of articles by Muir entitled "Studies in the Sierra" launched his successful career as a writer. He left the mountains and lived for awhile in Oakland, California. From there he took many trips, including his first to Alaska in 1879, where he discovered Glacier Bay. In 1880, he married Louie Wanda Strentzel and moved to Martinez, California , where they raised their two daughters, Wanda and Helen. Settling down to some measure of domestic life, Muir went into partnership with his father-in-law and managed the family fruit ranch with great success.

But ten years of active ranching did not quell Muir's wanderlust. His travels took him to Alaska many more times, to Australia, South America, Africa, Europe, China, Japan, and of course, again and again to his beloved Sierra Nevada.

In later years he turned more seriously to writing, publishing 300 articles and 10 major books that recounted his travels, expounded his naturalist philosophy, and beckoned everyone to "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings." Muir's love of the high country gave his writings a spiritual quality. His readers, whether they be presidents, congressmen, or plain folks, were inspired and often moved to action by the enthusiasm of Muir's own unbounded love of nature.

Through a series of articles appearing in Century magazine, Muir drew attention to the devastation of mountain meadows and forests by sheep and cattle. With the help of Century's associate editor, Robert Underwood Johnson, Muir worked to remedy this destruction. In 1890, due in large part to the efforts of Muir and Johnson, an act of Congress created Yosemite National Park. Muir was also personally involved in the creation of Sequoia , Mount Rainier , Petrified Forest and Grand Canyon national parks. Muir deservedly is often called the "Father of Our National Park System ".

Johnson and others suggested to Muir that an association be formed to protect the newly created Yosemite National Park from the assaults of stockmen and others who would diminish its boundaries. In 1892, Muir and a number of his supporters founded the Sierra Club to, in Muir's words, "do something for wildness and make the mountains glad." Muir served as the Club's president until his death in 1914.

In 1901, Muir published Our National Parks , the book that brought him to the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1903, Roosevelt visited Muir in Yosemite. There, together, beneath the trees, they laid the foundation of Roosevelt's innovative and notable conservation programs.

Muir and the Sierra Club fought many battles to protect Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, the most dramatic being the campaign to prevent the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley within Yosemite National Park. In 1913, after years of effort, the battle was lost and the valley that Muir likened to Yosemite itself was doomed to become a reservoir to supply the water needs of a growing San Francisco. The following year, after a short illness, Muir died in a Los Angeles hospital after visiting his daughter Wanda.

John Muir was perhaps this country's most famous and influential naturalist and conservationist. He taught the people of his time and ours the importance of experiencing and protecting our natural heritage. His words have heightened our perception of nature. His personal and determined involvement in the great conservation questions of the day was and remains an inspiration for environmental activists everywhere.

Source: Sierra Club Public Affairs
Date: March 1993

John Muir - A Brief Biography

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

History and Culture

History and Culture

Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau at Walden

The excursion park built at Ice Fort Cove

Henry David Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden started a long tradition of people coming to the pond and its surrounding woods for recreation and inspiration. The emergence of Walden as a public park was in keeping with the belief that nature is meant to be enjoyed by people. "I think that each town should have a park…a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation," he wrote in a 1859 journal entry lamenting the deforestation that had taken place around Walden. "All Walden wood might have been preserved for our park forever, with Walden in its midst."

In the latter part of the 19th century, numerous projects were undertaken to make Walden Pond a public destination for recreation. The Fitchburg Railroad, which had laid tracks past Walden the year before Thoreau took up residence there, built an excursion park on the shore at Ice Fort Cove in 1866. The facilities were mainly used for fund-raisers, festivals and groups. The park included concessions, swings, bathhouses, boats, baseball diamond, a hall for dining, dancing and public speaking and a cinder track for runners and bicyclists. The park burned down in 1902 and was never rebuilt.

Bathers at Walden Pond in the early twentieth century

The automobile brought increasing numbers of visitors to Walden Pond. The Town of Concord began offering swimming lessons in 1913 and bathhouses were built in 1917. Summer visitation had risen to 2,000 visitors a day even before the bathhouses were built.

In 1922, the Emerson, Forbes and Heywood families granted approximately 80 acres surrounding the pond to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with the stipulation of "preserving the Walden of Emerson and Thoreau, its shores and nearby woodlands for the public who wish to enjoy the pond, the woods and nature, including bathing, boating, fishing and picnicking." Middlesex County was given the responsibility for management of the reservation. In the summer of 1935, some 485,000 people visited Walden Pond, with Sunday crowds numbering as high as 25,000 visitors.

In November of 1945, the centennial of Thoreau’s move to Walden, Roland Wells Robbins, an amateur historian and Thoreau enthusiast, discovered and excavated the foundation of Thoreau’s chimney. In July of 1947, the Thoreau Society dedicated the inscribed fieldstone that marks the hearth site today. In 1965, the National Park Service designated Walden Pond as a Registered National Historic Landmark.

Flowersa and Grass gone wild...

Kitty on the prowl

Kittywake fly by

Ingatestone hall reflection

Damselfly

Permission to take off!

Friday, June 22, 2012

Henry David Thoreau

"Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each."

"Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something."

"If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see."

"What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can."

"Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it."

"There is no remedy for love but to love more."

Journal, July 25, 1839
"He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate."

Journal, February 11, 1840
"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."

Walden, Conclusion, 1854
"Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them."

Walden: Economy, 1854
"Man is the artificer of his own happiness."

Journal, January 21, 1838
"Goodness is the only investment that never fails."

Walden: Higher Laws, 1854
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor."

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

"That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest."

"[Water is] the only drink for a wise man."

"Men are born to succeed, not fail."

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

Walden, 1854
"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."

Walden: Reading, 1854

Featured Books The following books and tapes are available through Amazon.com:

Walden Paperback by Henry David Thoreau - Every library should have it and its spine should be well cracked. (I'm going to crack mine as soon as I'm finished here.)
Civil Disobedience, Solitude and Life Without Principle Paperback by Henry David Thoreau - The justification for his rebellion (he refused to pay taxes because of the Mexican American War).
Henry David Thoreau : Three Complete Books Hardcover by Henry David Thoreau - Get Walden, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods in a hardbound edition surely to last forever in your bookcase (especially if you don't read it).
The Portable Thoreau Paperback by Henry David Thoreau, Carl Bode - If you are actually planning on reading his works, this is the book to buy. At 698 pages, it hardly seems portable, but you receive a collection of his works to keep you reading for awhile. Enjoy!

For more information about Henry David Thoreau, try these links:

Thoreau World Wide - A good introduction to Henry David Thoreau. Make sure you read Background behind Walden.
The Life of Henry David Thoreau - No snazzy pictures, but a good outline of the author's life.
The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau - A great site! You can view a scan of Thoreau's handwriting (including analysis and translation), a list of related sites, and a frequently asked questions (FAQ) file.

Articles - The Quotations Page

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Bald Eagle

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Contributing Editor: Wendell P. Glick

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, and Personal Issues

Walden

Jefferson

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Emerson

Original Audience

Melville

Poe

The Recognition of Henry David Thoreau

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Walden

sui generis

Frost

Martin Luther King's

Questions for Reading and Discussion/ Approaches to Writing

Bibliography

The New Thoreau Handbook

American Literary Scholarship

Thoreau Society Quarterly

Studies in the American Renaissance

The Days of Henry Thoreau

http://college.cengage.com/english/heath/syllabuild/iguide/thoreau.html

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Henry Thoreau (1817-1862)

Ideas

- The search for ultimate begins with simplification and the dispelling of the superfluities of life, and with the desire for clarity of vision and spiritual alertness.

- There exists within each human being a moral sense and an intuitive capacity for the apprehension of spiritual turths.

- Trancendental spiritual truths are revealed through nature.

- The divine source of all things exists in nature, yet divine reality is not exhausted by nature.

- Reformation, even the reformation of society, begins with the reforming of the individual.

- Action from principle brings about change in institutions and governments.

Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

- "Heroes are famous or infamous because the progress of events has chosen to make them its steppingstones." (from his journal, 1837)

- ""What are you doing now?" [Ralph Waldo Emerson] asked. "Do you keep a journal?" So I make my first entry today." (from his journal, 1837)

- "As the truest society approaches always nearer to solitude, so the most excellent speech finally falls into silence." (from his journal, 1838)

- "What a hero one can be without moving a finger!." (from his journal, 1838)

- "We should be ready for all issues, not daring to die but daring to live. To the brave even danger is an ally." (from his journal, 1839)

- "Where there is a brave man, there is the thickest of the fight, there the post of honor." (from his journal, 1839)

- "An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day." (from his journal, 1840)

- "An honest book's the noblest work of Man." (from a letter to Helen Thoreau, 1840)

- "Drifting in a sultry day on the sluggish waters of the pond, I almost cease to live and begin to be." (from his journal, 1839)

- "Go where we will, we discover infinite change in particulars only, not in generals." (from his journal, 1840)

- "He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate." (from his journal, 1840)

- "He will get to the goal first who stands stillest." (from his journal, 1840)

- "The highest condition of art is artlessness." (from his journal, 1840)

- "In enthusiasm we undulate to the divine spiritus-as the lake to the wind." (from his journal, 1840)

- "Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me as my own thoughts." (from his journal, 1840)

- "The science of Human Nature has never been attempted, as the science of Nature has. The dry light has never shone on it, Neither physics nor metaphysics have touched it." (from his journal, 1840)

- "They who are ready to go are already invited." (from his journal, 1840)

- "The true laborer is recompensed by his labor, not by his employer. Industry is its own wages. ... Our true endeavor cannot be thwarted, nor we be cheated of our earnings unless by not earning them." (from his journal, 1840)

- "Truth is always paradoxical." (from his journal, 1840)

- "When a dog runs at you, whistle for him." (from his journal, 1840)

- "When we are shocked at vice, we express a lingering sympathy with it. Dry rot, rust, and mildew shock no man, for none is subject to them." (from his journal, 1840)

- "In a world of peace and love, music would be the universal language." (from "The Service", 1840)

- "The author's character is read from title page to end." (from his journal, 1841)

- "Friends will not only live in harmony, but in melody." (from his journal, 1841)

- "Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other." (from his journal, 1841)

- "I never was so rapid in my virtue but my vice kept up with me. ...
We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice." (from his journal, 1841)

- "Let us know and conform only to the fashions of eternity." (from his journal, 1841)

- "My Journal is that of me which would else spill over and run to waste, gleanings from the field which in action I reap. I must not live for it, but in it for the gods. They are my correspondent[s], to whom daily I send off this sheet postpaid. I am clerk in their counting room, and at evening transfer the account from daybook to ledger." (from his journal, 1841)

- "Our whole life is taxed for the least thing well done." (from his journal, 1841)

- "There is always a single ear in the audience, to which we address ourselves." (from his journal, 1841)

- "To be of most service to my brother I must meet him on the most equal and even ground." (from his journal, 1841)

- "The truly beneficent never relapses into a creditor." (from his journal, 1841)

- "We go about mending the times, when we should be building the eternity." (from his journal, 1841)

- "Wealth, no less than knowledge, is power." (from his journal, 1841)

- "When an individual takes a sincere step, then all the gods attend, and his single deed is sweet." (from his journal, 1841)

- "You must not blame me if I talk to the clouds." (from a letter to Lucy Brown, 1842)

- "He listens equally to the prayers of the believer and the unbeliever." (from his journal, 1842)

- "How hard it is to be greatly related to mankind! They are only my uncles and aunts and cousins. I hear of some persons greatly related, but only he is so who has all mankind for his friend." (from his journal, 1842)

- "I am amused to see from my window here how busily man has divided and staked off his domain. God must smile at [the] puny fences running hither and thither everywhere over the land." (from his journal, 1842)

- "I have not succeeded if I have an antagonist who fails. It must be humanity's success." (from his journal, 1842)

- "The stars are God's dreams, thoughts remembered in the silence of the night." (from his journal, 1842)

- "There must be some narrowness in the soul that compels one to have secrets." (from his journal, 1842)

- "Virtue is a bravery so hardy that it deals in what it has no experience in. ... It goes singing to its work. Effort is its relaxation." (from his journal, 1842)

- "We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue." (from his journal, 1842)

- "The cost of a thing ... is the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." (from his journal, 1845)

- "Men have become the tools of their tools." (from his journal, 1845)

- "For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it." (from his journal, 1845-1847)

- "Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something." (from a letter to Harrison Blake, 1848)

- "When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God-none of the servants. In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world." (from a letter to Harrison Blake, 1848)

- "A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight." (from "Civil Disobedience", 1849)

- "Action from principle, the perception and performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine." (from "Civil Disobedience", 1849)

- "Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one." (from "Civil Disobedience", 1849)

- "I heartily accept the motto-"That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe-"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have." (from "Civil Disobedience", 1849)

- "I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. ... They only can force me who obey a higher law than I." (from "Civil Disobedience", 1849)

- "If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution." (from "Civil Disobedience", 1849)

- "If [the government] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong I condemn." (from "Civil Disobedience", 1849)

- "If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplation, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders." (from "Civil Disobedience", 1849)

- "Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?" (from "Civil Disobedience", 1849)

- "Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined." (from "Civil Disobedience", 1849)

- "The more money, the less virtue." (from "Civil Disobedience", 1849)

- "The rich man ... is always sold to the institution which makes him rich." (from "Civil Disobedience", 1849)

- "There will never be a free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly." (from "Civil Disobedience", 1849)

- "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. ... the only house in a slave state in which a free man can abide with honor." (from "Civil Disobedience", 1849)

- "Why is [government] not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out faults. ... Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?" (from "Civil Disobedience", 1849)

- "A Friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "A simple woman down in Tyngsborough, at whose house I once stopped to get a draught of water, when I said, recognizing the bucket, that I had stopped there nine years before for the same purpose, asked if I was not a traveler, supposing that I had been traveling ever since, and had now come round again." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "A true poem is distinguished not so much by a felicitous expression, or any thought it suggests, as by the atmosphere which surrounds it." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "All good abides with him who waiteth wisely." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "All this worldly wisdom might be regarded as the once unamiable heresy of some wise man." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "Behold how the evening now steals over the fields, the shadows of the trees creeping farther and farther into the meadow, and erelong the stars will come to bathe in these retired waters." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "Books ... which even make us dangerous to existing institutions-such call I good books." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "But what is quackery? It is commonly an attempt to cure the diseases of a man by addressing his body alone." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. ... In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "Everyone has a devil in him that is capable of any crime in the long run." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "Friendship is ... a relation of perfect equality. ... Not that the parties to it are in all respects equal, but they are equal in all that respects or affects their Friendship." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "Here or nowhere is our heaven." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "In proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "It [would be] vain for me to endeavor to interpret the Silence. She cannot be done into English." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "Man tames Nature only that he may at last make her more free even than he found her." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterwards. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "My life is like a stroll upon the beach,
As near to the ocean's edge as I can go." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "Only the Wise are just." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "The process of discovery is very simple. An unwearied and systematic application of known laws to nature causes the unknown to reveal themselves." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "Silence is the universal refuge, ... our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "[Silence] is when we hear inwardly; sound, when we hear outwardly." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "They cherish each other's hopes. They are kind to each other's dreams." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "This poor globe, how it must itch in many places! Will no god be kind enough to spread a salve of birches over its sores?." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "This world is but canvas to our imaginations." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "Uncommon sense, that sense which is common only to the wisest." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "The universe is a sphere whose center is wherever there is intelligence. The sun is not so central as a man." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "We are still being born" (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "Who hears the fishes when they cry? It will not be forgotten by some memory that we were contemporaries." (from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

- "As to conforming outwardly and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that." (from a letter to Harrison Blake, 1850)

- "It is not when I am going to meet him, but when I am turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover that God is." (from a letter to Harrison Blake, 1850)

- "A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand!" (from his journal, 1850)

- "I feel ripe for something, yet do nothing, can't discover what that thing is. I feel fertile merely. It is seedtime with me. I have lain fallow long enough." (from his journal, 1850)

- "If the race had never lived through a winter, what would they think was coming?" (from his journal, 1850)

- "Let me say to you and to myself in one breath, Cultivate the tree which you have found to bear fruit in your soil." (from his journal, 1850)

- "Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head." (from his journal, 1850)

- "The newspapers are the ruling power. What Congress does is an afterclap." (from his journal, 1850)

- "We are ever dying to one world and being born into another." (from his journal, 1850)

- "A style in which the matter is all in all, and the manner nothing at all." (from his journal, 1851)

- "Ah, dear nature, the mere remembrance, after a short forgetfulness, of the pine woods! I come to it as a hungry man to a crust of bread." (from his journal, 1851)

- "All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy." (from his journal, 1851)

- "Do not seek expressions, seek thoughts to be expressed." (from his journal, 1851)

- "Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man and serves him directly." (from his journal, 1851)

- "Here I am thirty-four years old, and yet my life is almost wholly unexpanded. How much is in the germ! There is such an interval between my ideal and the actual in many instances that I may say I am unborn." (from his journal, 1851)

- "How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!" (from his journal, 1851)

- "I thank you, God. I do not deserve anything, I am unworthy of the least regard; and yet I am made to rejoice. I am impure and worthless, and yet the world is gilded for my delight and holidays are prepared for me, and my path is strewn with flowers." (from his journal, 1851)

- "If misery loves company, misery has company enough." (from his journal, 1851)

- "The intimations of the night are divine, methinks. Men might meet in the morning and report the news of the night-what divine suggestions have been made to them. I find that I carry with me into the day often some such hint derived from the gods-such impulses to purity, to heroism, to literary effort even, as are never day-born. ..." (from his journal, 1851)

- "It would give me such joy to know that a friend had come to see me, and yet that pleasure I seldom if ever experience." (from his journal, 1851)

- "My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant." (from his journal, 1851)

- "Nothing is so much to be feared as fear." (from his journal, 1851)

- "Sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not merely report an old, but make a new, impression ...: to frame these, that is the art of writing." (from his journal, 1851)

- "There comes into my mind such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion, and [I] have nought to do with it. I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers. This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself. I speak as a witness on the stand, and tell what I have perceived." (from his journal, 1851)

- "We live but a fraction of our life. Why do we not let on the flood, raise the gates, and set all our wheels in motion? He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. Employ your senses." (from his journal, 1851)

- "Associate reverently and as much as you can with your loftiest thoughts. Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid. Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame in which more may be developed and exhibited. Perhaps this is the main value of a habit of writing, of keeping a journal�that so we remember our best hours and stimulate ourselves. ... Having by chance recorded a few disconnected thoughts and then brought them into juxtaposition, they suggest a whole new field in which it was possible to labor and to think. Thought begat thought." (from his journal, 1852)

- "The bluebird carries the sky on his back." (from his journal, 1852)

- "Discipline yourself only to yield to love." (from his journal, 1852)

- "Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love, and pay him well." (from his journal, 1852)

- "Go not so far out of your way for a truer life; keep strictly onward in that path alone which your genius points out. Do the things which lie nearest to you, but which are difficult to do. Live a purer, a more thoughtful and laborious life, more true to your friends and neighbors, more noble and magnanimous." (from his journal, 1852)

- "The hero obeys his own law." (from his journal, 1852)

- "I heard one boy say to another in the street today, "You don't know much more than a piece of putty."" (from his journal, 1852)

- "My friend is one ... who takes me for what I am." (from his journal, 1852)

- "No man stands on truth. They are merely banded together as usual, one leaning on another and all together on nothing." (from his journal, 1852)

- "Now if there are any who think that I am vainglorious, that I set myself up above others and crow over their low estate, let me tell them that I could tell a pitiful story respecting myself as well as them, if my spirits held out to do it; ... I could enumerate a list of as rank offenses as ever reached the nostrils of heaven; that I think worse of myself than they can possibly think of me, being better acquainted with the man. I put the best face on the matter." (from his journal, 1852)

- "Our charitable institutions are an insult to humanity. A charity which dispenses the crumbs that fall from its overloaded tables, which are left after its feasts." (from his journal, 1852)

- "Write while the heat is in you." (from his journal, 1852)

- "A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance. Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age." (from his journal, 1853)

- "He who cuts down woods beyond a certain limit exterminates birds." (from his journal, 1853)

- "It is most remarkable that those flowers which are most emblematical of purity should grow in the mud." (from his journal, 1853)

- "It is surprising how much room there is in nature-if a man will follow his proper path." (from his journal, 1853)

- "Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. ... Some men think that they are not well in spring, or summer, or autumn, or winter; it is only because they are not well in them." (from his journal, 1853)

- "Silence alone is worthy to be heard." (from his journal, 1853)

- "The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them." (from his journal, 1854)

- "Why should we ever go abroad, even across the way, to ask a neighbor's advice? There is a nearer neighbor within us incessantly telling us how we should behave. But we wait for the neighbor without to tell us of some false, easier way." (from a letter to Harrison Blake, 1854)

- "Every human being is the artificer of his own fate. ... Events, circumstances, etc., have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown." (from his journal, 1854)

- "In Boston yesterday an ornithologist said significantly, "If you held the bird in your hand"; but I would rather hold it in my affections." (from his journal, 1854)

- "In my experience, at least of lute years, all that depresses a man's spirits is the sense of remissness-duties neglected, unfaithfulness-or shamming, impurity, falsehood, selfishness, inhumanity, and the like." (from his journal, 1854)

- "Most men are engaged in business the greater part of their lives because the soul abhors a vacuum, and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man's nobler faculties." (from his journal, 1854)

- "The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable; of a bad one, to make it less valuable." (from the "Slavery in Massachusetts" speech in Farmingham, 1854)

- "The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls-the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning." (from the "Slavery in Massachusetts" speech in Farmingham, 1854)

- "Probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country. And as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worse, and not the better, nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit." (from the "Slavery in Massachusetts" speech in Farmingham, 1854)

- "Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it." (from the "Slavery in Massachusetts" speech in Farmingham, 1854)

- "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are the games and amusements of mankind." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "All memorable events ... transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. ... Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "For more than five years I maintained myself ... solely by the labor of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I regret anything it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? " (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. ... I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher or, if it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "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." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "I have traveled a good deal in Concord." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "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 spare any more time for that one." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulette I could have worn." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "I prefer the natural sky to an opium eater's heaven." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "I went to the woods because I wished to live life 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." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even-for that is the seat of sympathy-he forthwith sets about reforming the world." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "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." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "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. ... 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. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal-that is your success." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "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 into contact with the more civilized." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "It is never too late to give up your prejudices." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "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." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "The meeting of two eternities, the past and future ... is precisely the present moment." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Money is not required to buy one necessity] of the soul." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Moral reform is an effort to throw off sleep." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Morning brings back the heroic ages." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Only that day dawns to which we are awake." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Our life is frittered away by detail. ... Simplify, simplify, simplify! ... Simplicity of life and elevation of purpose." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Our molting season, like that of the fouls, must be a crisis in our lives." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "The self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of all." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths. ... By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "The sun is but a morning star." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "There are nowadays professors of philosophy but not philosophers. ... 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. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "There is a solid bottom everywhere. We read that the traveler asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. But presently the traveler's horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy. "I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom." "So it has," answered the latter, "but you have not got half way to it yet."" (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged?" (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Things do not change; we change." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true coursev." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "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 that he hears, however measured or far away." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them." (from "Walden; or Life in the Woods", 1854)

- "Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence." (from his journal, 1855)

- "What a delicious sound! It is not merely crow calling to crow, for it speaks to me too. I am part of one great creature with him." (from his journal, 1855)

- "God could not be unkind to me if he should try." (from his journal, 1856)

- "It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all. I found it invariably true, the poorer I am, the richer I am." (from his journal, 1856)

- "Only that traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better." (from his journal, 1856)

- "New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion." (from a letter to Daniel Ricketson, 1857)

- "It is not enough to be industrious, so are the ants. What are you industrious about?" (from a letter to Harrison Blake, 1857)

- "With regards to essentials, I have never had occasion to change my mind." (from a letter to Harrison Blake, 1857)

- "A higher truth, though only dimly hinted at, thrills us more than a lower expressed." (from his journal, 1857)

- "Again and again I congratulate myself on my so-called poverty. I was almost disappointed yesterday to find thirty dollars in my desk which I did not know that I possessed, though now I should be sorry to lose it." (from his journal, 1857)

- "The day after never, we will have an explanation." (from his journal, 1857)

- "It is a spiral path within the pilgrim's soul." (from his journal, 1857)

- "This poor, timid, unenlightened, thick-skinned creature, what can it believe? I am, of course, hopelessly ignorant and unbelieving until some divinity stirs within me. Ninety-nine one-hundredths of our lives we are mere hedgers and ditchers, but from time to time we meet with reminders of our destiny." (from his journal, 1857)

- "Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sandbanks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines. You may run upon them as much as you please-even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stock holders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content." (from his journal, 1857)

- "All the community may scream because one man is born who will not do as it does, who will not conform because conformity to him is death. ... In the course of generations, however, men will excuse you for not doing as they do, if you will bring enough to pass in your own way." (from his journal, 1858)

- "The church! it is eminently the timid institution, and the heads and pillars of it are constitutionally and by principle the greatest cowards in the community." (from his journal, 1858)

- "The last new journal thinks that it is very liberal, nay, bold. ... If it had been published at the time of the famous dispute between Christ and the doctors, it would have published only the opinions of the doctors and suppressed Christ's. There is no need of a law to check the license of the press. It is law enough, and more than enough, to itself. Virtually, the community have come together and agreed what things shall be uttered, have agreed on a platform and to excommunicate him who departs from it, and not one in a thousand dares utter anything else. ... [The journals] have been bribed to keep dark. They are in the service of hypocrisy." (from his journal, 1858)

- "Newspapers, magazines, colleges, and all forms of government and religion express the superficial activity of a few, the mass either conforming or not attending." (from his journal, 1858)

- "The settled lecturers are as tame as the settled ministers. The audiences do not want to hear any prophets. ... They ask for orators that will entertain them and leave them where they found them." (from his journal, 1858)

- "All our life ... is a persistent dreaming awake." (from his journal, 1859)

- "Dr. Josiah Bartlett handed me a paper today, desiring me to subscribe for a statue to Horace Mann. I declined, and said that I thought a man ought not any more to take up room in the world after he was dead." (from his journal, 1859)

- "Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation." (from his journal, 1859)

- "Fear creates danger, and courage dispels it." (from his journal, 1859)

- "I went to the store the other day to buy a bolt for our front door, for, as I told the storekeeper, the Governor was coming here. "Aye," said he, "and the Legislature too." "Then I will take two bolts," said I. He said that there had been a steady demand for bolts and locks of late, for our protectors were coming." (from his journal, 1859)

- "It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know." (from his journal, 1859)

- "Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring." (from his journal, 1859)

- "Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment." (from his journal, 1859)

- "Princes and magistrates are often styled serene, but what is their turbid serenity to that ethereal serenity which the bluebird embodies? His Most Serene Birdship!" (from his journal, 1859)

- "We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success." (from his journal, 1859)

- "What we do best or most perfectly is what we have most thoroughly learned by the longest practice, and at length it falls from us without our notice, as a leaf from a tree. It is the last time we shall do it�our unconscious leavings." (from his journal, 1859)

- "You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can." (from his journal, 1859)

- "Let us make distinctions, call things by the right names." (from his journal, 1860)

- "The stupid you have always with you." (from his journal, 1860)

- "Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone." (from his journal, 1860)

- "What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" (from a letter to Harrison Blake, 1860)

- "The one great rule of composition-and if I were a professor of rhetoric, I should insist on this-is, to speak the truth. This first, this second, this third; pebbles in your mouth or not." (from "The Last Days of John Brown", 1860)

- "My affirmations or utterances come to me ready-made-not forethought-so that I occasionally awake in the night simply to let fall ripe a statement which I had never consciously considered before, and as surprising and novel and agreeable to me as anything can be. As if we only thought by sympathy with the universal mind, which thought while we were asleep. There is such a necessity [to] make a definite statement that our minds at length do it without our consciousness." (from his journal, 1860)

- "When I used to pick the berries for dinner on the East Quarter hills I did not eat one till I had done, for going a-berrying implies more things than eating the berries. They at home got only the pudding: I got the forenoon out of doors and the appetite for the pudding." (from his journal, 1860)

- "Nature is slow but sure; she works no faster than need be; she is the tortoise that wins the race by her perseverance." (from his journal, 1861)

- "Thank God, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!." (from his journal, 1861)

- "I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality." (from an article published in Atlantic, 1863)

- "If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!." (from an article published in Atlantic, 1863)

- "Is there any such thing as wisdom not applied to life?" (from an article published in Atlantic, 1863)

- "It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. So does the Devil work hard." (from an article published in Atlantic, 1863)

- "It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember!" (from an article published in Atlantic, 1863)

- "Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now." (from an article published in Atlantic, 1863)

- "There is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business." (from an article published in Atlantic, 1863)

- "We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities." (from an article published in Atlantic, 1863)

- "When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip." (from an article published in Atlantic, 1863)

- "For one that comes [into the wilderness] with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come with an ax or rifle." (from "The Main Woods", 1864)

- "The broadest philosophy is narrower than the worst poetry." (from the journal of Ralph Waldo Emerson)

- "I look ... not into the night, but to a dawn for which no man ever rose early enough." (from the journal of Ralph Waldo Emerson)

- "I catch myself philosophizing most eloquently when first returning to consciousness in the night or morning. I make the truest observations and distinctions then when the will is yet wholly asleep, and mind works like a machine without friction. ... There is a moment in the dawn when the darkness of the night is dissipated, and before the exhalations of the day begin to rise, when we see all things more truly than at any other time." (from "Concord Days" by Bronson Alcott)

- "I have a commonplace book for facts, and another for poetry." (from "Concord Days" by Bronson Alcott)

- "That is mine which none can steal from me." (from "Concord Days" by Bronson Alcott)

- "To shut the ears to the immediate voice of God, and prefer to know him by report will be the only sin." (from by Isaiah Williams)

- "One world at a time." (from "Thoreau" by Henry Seidel Canby)

- "City life: millions of people being lonesome together."

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