Walden

Extracts from Walden, by Henry David Thoreau (1854)


"... the man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off."

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"You must have a genius for charity as well as for anything else.  As for Doing-good,  that is one of the professions which are full.  Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.  Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation..."

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"...Persevere, even if the whole world call it doing evil..."

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"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root..."

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"Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind.  Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it."

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"I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse.  His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious."

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"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"

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"I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed.  I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself."

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"I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, that 'they asked a wise man, saying: Of the many celebrated trees which the Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in this?  He replied:  Each has its appropriate produce, and appointed season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious independents. - Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.' "

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"The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life.  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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"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor."

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"What news!  how much more important to know what that is which was never old!"

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"Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous."

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"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."

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"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.  Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure."

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"I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things.  We think that that is which appears to be."

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"Men esteem  truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man.  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 the ages."

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"...we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.  The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us.  ... Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails."

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"With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses.  If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains.  If the bell rings, why should we run?  ... Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opiinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin..."

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"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."

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"Time is the stream I go a-fishing in.  I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains."

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"The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things."

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"The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.  They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever."

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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. ... Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.  It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written"

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"What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study.  The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him."

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"The symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's speech."

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"The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.  They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically."

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"Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to."

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"..for the recorded wisdom of mankind...which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them."

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"A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; - and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading .... our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins."

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"We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were."

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"The solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirtsof Concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar religious experience, and is driven as he believes into silent gravity and exclusiveness by his faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience; but he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbours accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established worship among men.  Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster then, and through the liberalising influence of all the worthies, with Jesus Christ himself, and let "our church" go by the board."

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"We need to be provoked, - goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot."


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"We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment.  It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women."

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"I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one.  An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this.  Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in. ... No yard but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. ... Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow, - no gate - no front-yard - and no path to the civilised world."

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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.  ...  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 neighbourhood 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 beneficient 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 neighbourhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since."

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"Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rainstorms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves."

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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."

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"By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent."

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"I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.  To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating.  I love to be alone.  I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.  We are for the most part more lonely wehen we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers."

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"Soceity is commonly too cheap.  We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.  We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.  We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war."

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"Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realise where we are and the infinite extent of our relations."

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"I never fastened my door night or day, though I was to be absent several days; not even when the next fall I spent a fortnight in the woods in Maine.  And yet my house was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers.  The tired rambler could rest and warm himself by my fire, the literary amuse himself with the few books on my table, or the curious, by opening my closet door, see what was left of my dinner, and what prospect I had of a supper.  Yet, though many people of every class came this way to the pond, I suffered no serious inconvenience from these sources, and I never missed anything but one small book, a volume of Homer, which perhaps was improperly gilded, and this I trust a soldier of our camp has found by this time.  I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown.  These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.  Then Pope's Homers would soon get properly distributed."

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"YOU who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ punishments?  Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous.  The virtues of a superior man are like the wind;  the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends."

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"Though the youth grows at last indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive.  Listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it."

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" 'That in which men differ from brute beasts,' says Mencius, 'is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully.'  Who knows what sort of life would result if we had attained to purity?"


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