Powerful quotes in Walden by Thoreau that will become your favorites.
Having read Walden a few years back I was impressed with Thoreau’s thoughts and ideas. Walden is broken into several sections. This is the second, third and fourth sections, in order, of my favorite powerful Walden Thoreau quotes.
In order as they appear in Walden
Where I lived and what I lived for at Walden quotes
- “Morning is when I am awake and there is dawn in me.”
- “The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour.”
- “To be awake is to be alive.”
- “I know of no more encouraging fact than the… ability of man to elevate his life by a conscience endeavor.”
- “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
- “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately… I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
- “Our life is frittered away by detail.”
- “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand.”
- “Simplify, simplify… why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?”
- “When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.”
- “Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature.”
- “Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice and tradition, and delusion, and appearance… which cover the globe.”
Thoreau quotes on Reading
- “For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?”
- “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.”
- “Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”
- “Books, the oldest and best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves.”
- “I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature.”
- “A man, any man, will go out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; – and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading… we are underbred and low-lived and illiterate.”
- “How a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”
- “It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.”
- “Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.”
- “I love a broad margin to my life.”
- “My life itself was become my amusement.”
- “No yard! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills.”
Solitude quotes from Walden
- “I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude.”
- “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.”
- “To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone.”
- “I have never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
These were some of my favorite powerful quotes by Thoreau in Walden. For more quotes see the below blog post on Economy. 40 favorite quotes in Walden by Thoreau – part 1 (Economy)
