I picked up my old copy of Walden; Or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau today and began to flip through the familiar pages, reading the excerpts I had underlined when I first read it.
I thought I'd share. :)
Economy-
"Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!- I know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as this would be."
"All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant."
"Of a life of luxury, the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art."
"The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?"
Clothing-
"For he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected."
Architecture-
"Oe peice of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon."
Where I Lived-
"The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it."
"Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance."
"Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself."
"Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; istelf an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly-acquired force and aspiration from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air- to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light."
"The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is a wake 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?"
"To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts."
"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 I should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire."
"Time is but 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."
Reading-
"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."
"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."
"A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself."
"Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations."
"The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones."
Sounds-
"Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amids the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, unti by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time."
"Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour."
"It seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it."
"Every path but your own is the path of fate."
"Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied."
"I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next summer, the Manilla hemp and coconut husks, the old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails."
"All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmoshpere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it."
"It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the wood-side; reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sings with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their transgression."
"Expressive of a mind which has reached the gelatinous mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy and courageous thought."
Solitude-
"Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled."
"There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite at our elbows."
"I believe that men are generaeelly still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced."
"There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still."
"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 patterning 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."
"Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain storms 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."
"Society is commonly too cheap...... We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are."
"I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls."
"Let me have a draught of undiluted morning air."
"She was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring."
Visitors-
"I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way."
"One inconvenience I sometimes experience in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plough out again through the side of his head."
"To him, Homer was a great writer, though what his writing was about he did not know."
"There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the re-origination of many of the institutions of society."
"Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of all, who thought that I was forever singing, 'this is the house that I built; this is the man that lives in the house that I built;' but they did not know that the third line was, 'these are the folks that worry the man that lives in the house that I built'."
The Village-
"Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations."
"A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On land only the gras and trees wave, bt the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. It is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We shll, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it."
"Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth."
