Walden, Volume 1 |
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Common terms and phrases
bad neighbor bark beans better birds blackberry boards bread busk called cars cellar Ceres cerned chanticleer CHIG civilized clothes commonly Concord corn crop cultivated distant dollars door dwelling earth England ERSITY experience eyes farm farmer field fire Fitchburg Railroad furniture grass hand hear heard heaven horse hour ical Iliad Indian James Collins JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL johnswort keep labor learned live look luxury man's mankind Massasoit mean merely messen miles molasses morning Nature neighbors never night once Patroclus perchance pine poor race railroad rest round savage season seed shelter side sing SITY UNIV sometimes sound speak stone sumach summer tain things thought tion town tree true UNIV MICH UNIV UNIV UNIVE UNIVE MICHI village Walden Pond wigwam wild wind winter wise woodchuck woods worth Zoroaster
Popular passages
Page 143 - I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...
Page 84 - We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas ; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
Page 153 - And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.
Page 25 - Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
Page 128 - ... but a deed of it, took his word for his deed — for I dearly love to talk — cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. This experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of realestate broker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly.
Page 211 - I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.
Page 44 - In the long run men hit only what • they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, / they had better aim at something high.
Page 196 - I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have.
Page 8 - In most books, the /, or first person, is omitted ; in this it will be retained ; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly' do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.
Page 205 - There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.