Thinking: Walden - Henry David Thoreau

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily accquired than got rid of

Who made them serfs of the soil?
How many a poor immortal soul have I met well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty
It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before
the laboring man
He has no time to be anything but a machine
making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day
but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself

What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad
... and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries
The ancient philosophers, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inwards

voluntary poverty
to be a philosopher is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically

What does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous incessant and hotter fires
I have been anxious to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment
Clothing

true utility - the object is, to retain the vital heat, secondary to cover nakedness
A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in, for him the old will do. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they served his valet. bare feet are older than shoes, and he make them do
I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If you have any new enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want something to do, or rather, something to be.
All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life
And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him

for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them
Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have
Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?

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 [see also who needs 4G, 5G, 6G, new and newer iphones,... Tech is driving, not demand]

As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly
I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot [if you take other transportation you need to add to travelling time the time it takes to earn the money for the transport]
This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it

I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men.
Furniture

I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them
Morning

I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did
Renew thyself completely each day; do it again and again and forever again
The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Men think that it is essential to export ice, talk through a telegraph, ride thirty miles an hour. But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.
I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper
To a philosopher all NEWS, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip.
When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence - that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of reality.
We spend mor on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. I love to be alone. A man thinking or working is always alone.
Certainly less frequently would suffice for all important and hearty conversations
I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.
It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route and make a beaten track for ourselves.
Do not trouble yourself much to get new things

Not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century (sic!), but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.

Thinking