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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). |
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