The cheapest way to travel, and the way to travel the farthest in the shortest distance, is to go afoot, carrying a dipper, a spoo...n, and a fish line, some Indian meal, some salt, and some sugar.... Any one of these things I mean, not all together. I have traveled thus some hundreds of miles without taking any meal in a house, sleeping on the ground when convenient, and found it cheaper, and in many respects more profitable, than staying at home. So that some have inquired why it would not be best to travel always. But I never thought of traveling simply as a means of getting a livelihood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man... can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is "sensitive;" or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture--in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any relations in a social order will endure, if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy which qualifies l...ife for immortality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is wonderful how well watered this country is.... Generally, you may go any direction in a canoe, by making frequent but not ve...ry long portages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house wh...ich I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Are you cold too, poor Pleiads, This frosty night?"... "Yes, and so are the Hyads: See us cuddle and hug," says the Pleiads, "All six in a ring: it keeps us warm: We huddle together like birds in a storm:LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sea frozen in a storm is the image which most nearly describes [Switzerland] to me. Whether you look up at its awful solitudes... or down where it rests its icy tongue on the valley, with the pink crocus blossoming on the very edge; whether you examine its blue and broken ice or draw away from its fearful crevasse, or think of its cold, defined, steady, and silent course, with the immense boulders on its bosom--wherever and whenever you see it, it is the miracle of nature, the wonder of the Alpine world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It grieves me to the very Heart, when I see several young Gentlemen, descended of honest Parents, run up and down hurrying from on...e End of the Town to the other, calling in at every Place of Resort, without being able to fix a Quarter of an Hour in any, and in a particular Haste without knowing for what. It would (methinks) be some Consolation, if I could perswade these precipitate young Gentlemen to compose this Restlessness of Mind, and apply themselves to any Amusement, how trivial soever, that might give them Employment, and keep them out of Harm's Way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know my lazy, leaden twang Is like the reason in a storm;... And yet it brings the storm to bear. I twang it out and leave it there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »