Walden. Henry David Thoreau.

Walden, Or, Life in the Woods
Henry David Thoreau
New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.
1854 (1985)


Why read it? Walden is a "you-are-there" book. Want a period of solitude in your life? Read Walden. You not only read about Thoreau's living alone in a cabin at Walden Pond, outside Concord, Massachusetts, from 1845 to 1847. You live it with him. You actually experience the solitude experienced by Thoreau. This book I have read several times, usually when I need a break from the pace of modern American living. Each time I come away relaxed and determined to live my life as intensely as did Thoreau.

Some ideas from the book:
"Men have no time to be anything but a machine." "...making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day...." "...resignation is confirmed desperation." Confucius: "To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge." "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." "For my greatest skill has been to want but little." "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...." "For a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone."

"To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts." "I went to the woods because...when I came to die, [I did not want to] discover that I had not lived." "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life...." "Our life is frittered away by detail." "...all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea." "...news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or twelve years beforehand with sufficient accuracy."

"...books...are as dull as their readers." "How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book." "In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and saw the perch, which I seemed to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon traveling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks of the forest." "In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a perfect forest mirror...." "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." "You can always see a face in the fire." "Squirrels are always performing for spectators." "The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch and the fisherman swallows the pickerel...." "...the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade...."

Quote: "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."

Quote: "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...."

Quote: "Things do not change, we change."