Thoreau Quotes

I'm still trying to find some essays to teach for class. I have my book, but it is a pretty quick read -- Into The Wild. My theme is something like "The American Dream." I want to look at alternatives to the American Dream or people that question it and why. I thought about just doing one chapter from Walden, but I could see his language turning off someone not used to it. I think I'll use the first chapter from Desert Solitaire by Abbey and maybe look at the films Roger and Me, Fight Club, and Office Space. Maybe spend some time on pop-culture or advertising and how it shapes what Americans see as success. Any thoughts? I am starting to FREAK out!! Here are some Thoreau quotes. Simplify, Simplify, Simplify!!!


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 have become the tools of their tools.

My Aunt Maria asked me to read the life of Dr. Chalmers, which, however, I did not promise to do. Yesterday, Sunday, she was heard through the partition shouting to my Aunt Jane, who is deaf, "Think of it! He stood half an hour today to hear the frogs croak, and he wouldn't read the life of Chalmers.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do want society.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is in prison.

In the streets and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it,-- dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in the distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I come home to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful. I have told many that I walk every day about half the daylight, but I think they do not believe it. I wish to get the Concord, the Massachusetts, the America, out of my head and be sane a part of every day.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.