Select passages from Walden

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

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The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling.  Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

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

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

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Men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries.

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To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.  It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men.  Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.  Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.  To be awake is to be alive.  I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.  How could I have looked him in the face?

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To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.  Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

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I went to the woods because I wished to live 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.  I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.  I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.  For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

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Time is but the stream I go a-fishin in

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To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem.

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There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still.  There was never yet such a storm but it was Aeolian music to a healthy and innocent man.  Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness.  While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.

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The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too.

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I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life.  To be alone was something unpleasant.  But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery.  In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I  was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since.  Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me.  I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.

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Men frequently say to me, "I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially."  I am tempted to reply to such - this whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space.  How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments?  Why should I feel lonely?  Is not our planet in the Milky Way?  This which you put seems to me not to be the most important question.  What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?  I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.  What do we want most to dwell near to?  Not to many men surely...but to the perennial source of our life...this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar.