Walden Quotes

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”

“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.”

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”

“I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.”

“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 never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

“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. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

“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.”

“All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.”

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

“Let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.”

“Things do not change; we change.”

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”

“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”

“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.”

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

“For my greatest skill has been to want but little.”

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

“In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.”

“But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal.”

“Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath.”

“You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;”

“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”

“We may safely trust a good deal more than we do.”

“Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.”

“To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”

“The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.”

“When I have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all—looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of the nape of his neck—I have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because he had all that to carry.”

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial.

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”

“An abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning.”

“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 settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance...”

“Be it life or death, we crave only reality.”

“The symbol of an ancient man’ s thought becomes a modern man’ s speech.”