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Walden Quotations 


"When I wrote the following pages . . . I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which 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." Henry David Thoreau, "Economy," Walden (1854).
"My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry, blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub oaks and sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut." Henry David Thoreau, "Sounds," Walden (1854).
"The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link. . . . The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like a scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town. . . . All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them." Henry David Thoreau, "Sounds," Walden (1854).
"[My beanfield] was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. . . . Though I gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all once, I hoed them unusually well as far as I went, and was paid for it in the end. . . I harvested twelve bushels of beans." Henry David Thoreau, "The Beanfield," Walden (1854).
"The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation." Henry David Thoreau, "Economy," Walden (1854).
"In Wildness is the preservation of the World." Henry David Thoreau, "Walking" (1862).