Walden, Volume 1

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Houghton, Mifflin, 1882 - Authors, American - 357 pages

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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.

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