A few years ago I decided to read more of the classic books. That year I was able to read one book per month and on a whim decided to read Walden by Henry David Thoreau. At first glance the book comes across as an account of his squatting on private property by Walden Pond for two years. Choosing to live as simply as he could, he mingled the book with his thoughts on living well. In reality, the book takes on the theme of freeing ourselves – and others – from bondage.
Thoreau does this by first showing how so many of us place ourselves into the bondage of debt, specifically for a home, and because of the daily toil that we miss out on the best parts of life and improving our minds.
“As with our colleges, so with a hundred ‘modern improvements’; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compounding interest…”
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things… They are but improved means to an unimproved end… this 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.”
Walden was a pleasant encounter, thought provoking, and encouragement from a great thinker from 1845. I recommend reading this book if you should be so inclined.
Here are more than 40 of my personal favorite quotes from Walden by Thoreau in his “Economy” section.
~Bryan
In order as they appear in Walden:
ECONOMY, Walden
- “The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.”
- “It is hard to have an overseer… but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.”
- “What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”
- “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
- “No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.”
- “We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do.”
- “Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success.”
- “… a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and call all be obtained at a trifling cost.”
- “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but [are] positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
- “… but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.”
- “No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety… to have fashionable … unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.”
- “But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not?”
- “I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.”
- “We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion.”
- “Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”
- “In the long run men hit only what they aim at.”
- “We know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think.”
- “It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies.”
- “Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary.”
- “…The number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax [rent or interest] for this outside garment… [that] now helps to keep them poor as long as they live.”
- “I find for the most part they have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, that they may become the real owners of their farms.”
- “The man who has actually paid for his farm with his labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point to him.”
- “The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
- “And when… [he] has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be that the house… has got him.”
- “For our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.”
- “Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have.”
- “Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?”
- “It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow.”
- “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
- “Men have become the tools of their tools.”
- “The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful.”
- “A taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors.”
- “My days in the woods were not very long ones… I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it.”
- “Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants.”
- “How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?”
- “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things.”
- “They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”
- “As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly.”
- “I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot.”
- “I was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius.”
- “I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer.”
- “A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince.”
- “Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.”
- “To maintain one’s self… is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely.”
- “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscience design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”
- “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
