QUOTES FROM WALDEN "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." "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 where moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before." "We are made to exaggerate the importance of the work we do." "There are nowadays, professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher . . . is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically." "I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters." "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." "While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings." "Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?" "The first settlers of this town . . . were forced to cut their bread very thin for a long season. . . . We are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our fathers did their wheaten." "I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment." "I found that, by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study." "I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account . . . I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way." "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." "I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them." "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life." "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" "Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in." "My days were not days of the week . . . nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of the clock." "Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?" "And hark! Here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a thousand hills." "Let me have a draught of undiluted morning air. Morning air! . . . Bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world."