Quotes Reviews
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Thoreau claimed to be that very rare thing, a happy man - "I love my fate to the very core and rind" he wrote, and throughout his life he kept faith with this love.
Probably Thoreau is best known for his often quoted statement "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation", but few people may know that this line is taken from his beautiful and life-affirming work, 'Walden' in which he describes his life and thoughts during his two years and two months' sojourn on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. During this time he lived in a one roomed house which he had built himself and "earned my living by the labour of my hands only".
A paragraph from an introduction to Thoreau's work by Joseph Wood Krutch seems to me to capture the essence of the man:
"The lesson he had taught himself, and which he tried to teach others, was summed up in the one word "Simplify". That meant: simplify the outward circumstances of your life; simplify your needs and your ambitions; learn to delight in the simple pleasures which the world of Nature affords. It meant also: scorn public opinion; refuse to accept the common definitions of success; refuse to be moved by the judgement of others. And unlike most who advocate such attitudes, he put them into practice."
Here I offer a few of my chosen words from this extraordinary man which come with my recommendation: if you haven't read him yet, do so straightaway - you'll enjoy his acquaintance.
"What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is... Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe... I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors."
"One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle."
"The greater part of what my neighbours call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is likely to be my good behaviour. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can old man, - you who have lived seventy years, not without honour of a kind, - I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels."
"Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of a fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We observe dogs and cats acquiring the same second nature."
"I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes,"
"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."
"Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million, count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail."
"While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons, I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me."
"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."
"Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are."
