Walden: Or, Life in the WoodsHoughton Mifflin, 1906 - 119 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
animal Baker Farm beans beautiful birds Boston bottom called cellar clothes color commonly Concord dark deep door earth England eyes F. B. Sanborn Fair Haven farm farmer feel feet field fire fish forest grass Greek ground hand hear heard heaven Henry David Thoreau hills human hunter Iliad inches Indian John Field johnswort Journal labor leaves Line 11 Line 9 live look loon man's meadow mean Merrimack Rivers mile morning nature neighbors never night once perchance perhaps pitch pine poet poor railroad rain river rods sand seen shore shrub oaks side snow sometimes sound spring stand summer surface things Thoreau thought tion town traveller tree true village Walden Pond walk warm wild William Ellery Channing wind winter wood thrush woodchuck woods word
Popular passages
Page 101 - 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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life...
Page 119 - There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us.
Page 373 - And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests ; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.
Page 58 - 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 85 - I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious.
Page 358 - Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises ? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Page 3 - 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 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.
Page 9 - It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilising rain on their fields.
Page 260 - I could not get within half a dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface, turning his head this way and that, he coolly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the .boat. It was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution. He led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it.
Page 11 - The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of any thing, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?