Walden Book Review

Walden book review

“The millions are awake enough for physical labor, but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive”

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids..

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture or to carve a statue and so to make a few objects beautiful. But it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. The affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. “Pg 74

“Pg 77 to a philosopher all news , as it is called is gossip and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.”

PG 92 “ I had this advantage , at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. “

PG 112 i love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude”

Pg 142 i am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as i then dis, thieving and robbery would be unkonwn. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.

PG there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. Pg 63

PG 57 for my greatest skill has been to want but little

PG 37 shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the community… where is this division of labor to end? And what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.”

PG 29 We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven”

Pg 6 the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”

Pg 4 so much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell. Most men even in this comparatively free country through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious care and superfluous coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them . their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day, he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men, his labor would depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance, which his growth requires.

Walden is a book by Henry David Thoreau that chronicles his two-year experiment of living simply and independently by Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts1234. He built a small cabin on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and grew his own food, did odd jobs, read books, and observed nature2. He also reflected on various topics such as economy, society, solitude, spirituality, and civil disobedience4

, (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 all the marrow of life.””Insert quote and find a way to creatively astheticly show this in the video).

I originally heard of this book from Tim ferris who kept this book with him during his first mini retirement, and for some reason