1.19.2014

Quotes - Walden

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

Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass and invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish temselves around and within him... And he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. As he simplifies his life, the laws of te universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

If you are restricted in your range by poverty... you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler.

...There are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals... Than it is to explore the private sea, the atlantic and pacific of one's being alone.

Looking up, i abserved a very slight and graceful hawk... It was the most ethereal flight i had ever witnessed... It appeared to have no companion in the universe - sporting there alone - and to need none but the morning and the ether with which it played. It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it.

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 infinitely wild... We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the aight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features... We need to witness our own limita transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

While civilisation has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them.

Yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necassaries, but for want of luxuries.