BOOK

Walden

• Creator: Henry David Thoreau
• Year: 1854
• Date: 9 March 2026

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Selected Quotes and Highlights

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.

The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.

Spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.

As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime.

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.

If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale.

If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets.

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.

The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

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.

But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavour to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.

Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.

He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established.

We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us.

In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven.

Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

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.

There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day.

The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.

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