I’ve been reading more classics lately and just finished Walden by Henry Thoreau. Have you read that one? Maybe years and years ago? Here are some of my thoughts and favorite quotes for you to enjoy 🙂
Reading Walden
Reading Walden was slow going- I started it in 2020 and would often only read a page or two a day, which is much slower than my usual reading pace. But that wasn’t a bad thing in the end because so much of the book seemed to just get better as it was savored and thought through!
Considered by many to be Thoreau’s materwork, Walden encourages the reader to “live deliberately,” to pursue freedom, and to question conformity. It is a mix of poetic descriptions of nature interspersed with thoughts on ethics, philosophy, and observations on human nature.
Your mileage may vary of course (there were a few comments here and there that rubbed me the wrong way) but overall I found Walden to be a thought provoking and worthwhile read.
Quotes from Walden
Note: These may not be the most famous or “best” quotes, they are just the snippets that caught my attention and fancy as I read. Quotes are listed with chapter name for convenience.
“We have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.”
Thoreau, Walden: Economy
“No doubt another may also think for me, but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.”
Thoreau, Walden: Economy
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimportant end.”
Thoreau, Walden: Economy
“As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly.”
Thoreau, Walden: Economy
“Spending… the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.”
Thoreau, Walden: Economy
“It costs more than it comes to.”
Thoreau, Walden: Economy
“To be awake is to be alive.”
Thoreau, Walden: Where I Lived
“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?”
Thoreau, Walden: Where I Lived
“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.”
Thoreau, Walden: Where I lived
“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightly on the shelves of every cottage.”
Thoreau, Walden: Reading
“A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar, but here are golden words.”
Thoreau, Walden: Reading
“These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them according to his ability, by his words and his life.”
Thoreau, Walden: Reading
“It’s time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.”
Thoreau, Walden: Reading
“I love a broad margin in my life.”
Thoreau, Walden: Sounds
“I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark.”
Thoreau, Walden: Solitude
“It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run ‘amok’ against society; but I preferred that society should run ‘amok’ against me, it being the desperate party.”
Thoreau, Walden: The Village
“No humane being past thoughtless age of boyhood, will wontanly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.”
Thoreau, Walden: Higher Laws
“I withdrew yet further into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast.”
Thoreau, Walden: House-Warming
“The harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have ot detected, is still more wonderful.”
Thoreau, Walden: The Pond in Winter
“The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever!”
Thoreau, Walden: Spring
“We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us.”
Thoreau, Walden: Spring
“In a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven.”
Thoreau, Walden: Spring
“We need the tonic of wilderness.”
Thoreau, Walden: Spring
“The universe is wider than our views of it.”
Thoreau, Walden: Conclusion
“I had several more lives to live.”
Thoreau, Walden: Conclusion
“How deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!”
Thoreau, Walden: Conclusion
“Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.”
Thoreau, Walden: Conclusion
“No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth.”
Thoreau, Walden: Conclusion
“The fault-finger will find faults even in Paradise.”
Thoreau, Walden: Conclusion
“Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.”
Thoreau, Walden: Conclusion
If you have any recommendations for the next classic books that should be on my to-read list, feel free to comment below! 🙂
