I am sorry to think that you do not get a manās most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.
āJournal, 15 March 1854I am still a learner, not a teacher, feeding somewhat omnivorously, browsing both stalk and leavesābut I shall perhaps be enabled to speak with the more precision and authority by and byāif philosophy and sentiment are not buried under a multitude of details.
āThoreau to H. G. O. Blake, 21 May 1856I am surveying, instead of lecturing, at present. Let me have a skimming from your “pan of unwrinkled cream.”
āThoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 31 December 1856I am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks.
āThoreau to H. G. O. Blake, 2 May 1848I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer.
āWaldenI aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw himāmy next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words.
āWaldenI awoke into a music which no one about me heard. Whom shall I thank for it?
āJournal, 22 June 1851I begin to see how that the preparation for all issues is to do so virtuously.
āJournal, 19 February 1842I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.
ā"Civil Disobedience"ĀI cannot but believe that acorns were intended to be the food of man. They are agreeable to the palate as the mother’s milk to the babe.
āJournal, 8 October 1851I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me that, by the want of pecuniary wealth, I have been nailed down to this my native region so long and steadily, and made to study and love this spot of earth more and more. What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering? The traveler’s is but a barren and comfortless condition. Wealth will not buy a man a home in nature-house nor farm there. The man of business does not by his business earn a residence in nature, but is denaturalized rather.
āJournal, 12 November 1853I cannot see the bottom of the sky, because I cannot see to the bottom of myself. It is the symbol of my own infinity.
āJournal, 23 June 1840I catch an echo of the great strain of Friendship played somewhere, and feel compensated for months and years of commonplace.
āJournal, 13 July 1857I did not hear the strains after they had issued from the flute, but before they were breathed into it, for the original strain precedes the sound by as much as the echo follows after, and the rest is the perquisite of the rocks and trees and beasts.
āJournal, 18 August 1841I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.
āWaldenI do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.
āThoreau to H. G. O. Blake, 27 March 1848I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region.
ā"Life without Principle"I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge beforeāa discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.
ā"Walking"I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.
āJournal, February 1851