Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
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Walden
Walden by noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and manual for self-relianc
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It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.
I desire to speak somewhere without bounds.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is.
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. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal,…
To be a philosopher is to solve some of the problems of life–not only theoretically but practically.
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 practise…
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.
You must not only aim right, but draw the bow with all your might.
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
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.
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
We need the tonic of wildness... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
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 do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all encumbrances, and reduce…