• General Overview
  • Economy: The Experiment in Deliberate Living
    • Central thesis: "I went to the woods to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life"
    • Quiet desperation: most men lead lives of quiet desperation, crushed by inherited farms and debt
    • Necessaries: food, shelter, clothing, fuel secured, then one may adventure on life freely
    • Cost as life: the cost of a thing is the amount of life exchanged for it
    • Simplify, simplify: keep accounts on your thumbnail; reduce life to two or three affairs
    • Voluntary poverty: only by owning little can one observe life impartially and wisely
  • Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
    • Rich in what you let alone: a man is rich in proportion to things he can afford to leave fallow
    • Live free and uncommitted: being committed to a farm differs little from the county jail
    • Independence Day 1845: began living in the woods, house unfinished, airy and unplastered
    • Morning as awakening: to be awake is to be alive; moral reform is throwing off sleep
    • Deliberate living: drive life into a corner, reduce it to lowest terms, publish its meanness or sublimity
    • Railroad rides upon us: we do not ride the railroad; it rides upon us, and the sleepers are men
  • Reading, Sounds, and Solitude
    • Noble reading: books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written
    • Classics as oracles: read Homer and Æschylus in Greek; translations fall short of the original
    • Living language: all things and events speak a copious language without metaphor
    • Broad margin: love a broad margin to life, unclaimed space around every activity
    • Companionable solitude: never found a companion so companionable; company, even the best, is wearisome
    • Sane doubleness: by conscious effort the mind stands aloof from actions and consequences
  • Visitors, the Bean-Field, and the Village
    • Three chairs: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society
    • The woodchopper: a Canadian natural child, simple and content, revering Homer without understanding
    • Small Herculean labor: seven miles of bean rows; hand-labor at drudgery's verge yields a classic result
    • Weed war: pigweed, sorrel, and piper-grass are Trojans with sun, rain, and dew on their side
    • Village gauntlet: houses arranged in lanes so every traveler runs the gantlet and gets a lick
    • Being lost: not till we have lost the world do we begin to find ourselves
  • The Ponds, Baker Farm, and Higher Laws
    • Earth's eye: looking into a lake, the beholder measures the depth of his own nature
    • Walden unchanged: after all its ripples, the pond has no permanent wrinkle; all change is in me
    • Wild fruit: true taste of huckleberries belongs only to the plucker, not the market
    • Flint's Pond and John Field: property poverty versus true wealth; live simply and fish as sport
    • Higher laws: two instincts, savage and spiritual; hunting and fishing are initiation to be outgrown
    • Purity: chastity is the flowering of man; the body is a temple redeemed by austerity
  • Brute Neighbors and House-Warming
    • Ant war: red republicans and black imperialists fight a bellum with silent resolution, rivaling Austerlitz
    • Loon and man: a cunning underwater rival on the pond, betrayed by his demoniac laugh
    • Wild neighbors: mouse, partridge, otter, raccoon, phoebe, robin exhibit themselves to the patient watcher
    • House-warming: building the chimney and fireplace, the most vital part of the house
    • One-room hall: dream of an open golden-age house where necessities are the chief ornaments
    • Fire as companion: fire left alive three or four hours, a cheerful and trustworthy housekeeper
  • Former Inhabitants, Winter Animals, and the Pond in Winter
    • Conjured neighbors: summons former occupants—Cato, Zilpha, Brister, Wyman—to walk with him
    • Vanished village: cellar dents and covered wells remain; the lilac alone survives and blossoms
    • Winter visitors: woodchopper, farmer, poet, philosopher; the small house rings with mirth and sober talk
    • Frozen ponds: ice creates shorter routes and strange views; the pond becomes a vast trodden moose-yard
    • Sounding the bottom: Walden measured at 102 feet, not bottomless; a deep pond made for a symbol
    • Ice harvest and cosmopolitan well: hundred men cut azure cakes; Charleston, Madras, Bombay drink at his well
  • Spring and Conclusion
    • Great thaw: red squirrels chuckling, grass flames up green fire, Walden dead and alive again
    • Moral renewal: spring is the creation of the world; on such a morning all men's sins are forgiven
    • Tonic of wildness: village life would stagnate without unexplored forests, marshes, unfathomed land and sea
    • Left Walden: departed September 6, 1847, for as good a reason as he went
    • Different drummer: if a man does not keep pace, perhaps he hears a different drummer; let him step to it
    • Castles in air and truth: build foundations under dreams; truth wears well; the sun is but a morning star
• Deep Dive
  • Introduction
    • Introduction · I
      • A Classic Revered and Unread
        • Revered and unread: the book risks becoming as honored and neglected as the Bible
        • A dense moment: Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass arose together mid-century
        • Greatest influence: of the era's classics, Walden shaped America's present self-image most
        • Undying urge: modern overload revives the wish to simplify, camp, retreat to second homes
        • Polemical drive: Walden aims at conversion, unlike the meandering A Week
      • The Experiment at the Pond
        • Diagnosed malaise: drudgery and petty distraction in the Concord society around him
        • Stated aim: "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life"
        • Practical motive: he needed privacy, quiet, and a "broad margin" for writing
        • July 4, 1845: built a single-room cabin on Emerson's land, a mile south of Concord
        • Two years' yield: drafts of A Week and Walden; refused poll tax over slavery
      • Voice and Method
        • Contrast with Emerson: his oratory wearies; Thoreau's eye rests on a multitudinous world
        • Limpid observation: precise naming slides into startling figuration, as when faded flowers show "sincerity"
        • Nature as symbol: from Emerson's Idealism — every natural fact symbolizes a spiritual fact
        • Self-portrait: "a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot"
        • Two million words: journals of refined observation; Walden lives in its particulars
      • Transcendental Inheritance and Social Critique
        • Seventeenth-century kinship: Matthiessen traces correspondences between inner self and outer Nature
        • Emerson's doubt: Thoreau "wants a little ambition" — "captain of a huckleberry party"
        • Concord as microcosm: Cape Cod and Ktaadn excursions always returned to a cosmos-enough village
        • No selective love: "Sounds" praises the railroad's commerce as confident, serene, adventurous
        • Quiet desperation: the farmer's immortal soul crushed beneath barns and ceaseless labor
        • Gentleman's prerogative: the "pastime" of self-support sits uneasily beside others' necessity
    • Introduction · II
      • The Economics of Doing Without
        • Wealth as subtraction: "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone"
        • Asceticism extended: continence from diet to sex, generative energy preserved rather than dissipated
        • Luxury financed by surplus: the cabin retreat depended on an interwoven, slave-driving economy
        • White's caution: no clear economic system here; Thoreau wrote as if readers were male, unmarried, well-connected
        • Tonic, not cure-all: a condiment, "an invitation to life's dance," an antidote to apathy and anxiety
      • The Practical Thoreau
        • Doer among dreamers: unlike most Transcendentalists he could tend gardens, make repairs, build
        • Actual carpenter: he gave Bronson Alcott's fanciful summerhouse real boards and joints
        • Surveyor: over two hundred surveys between 1849 and 1861, mostly in and around Concord
        • Pencil maker: his grinding machine produced the least gritty pencils in America
        • Credibility by competence: repeated practical know-how makes the spiritual narrator trustworthy
      • Nature Without Illusion
        • Sounding the pond: with compass, chain, and line he disproves Walden's rumored bottomlessness
        • Franklin's spectacles: the Romantic Nature-celebrant also observes ice bubbles, tints, and freezing like a scientist
        • Nature red in tooth and claw embraced: myriads sacrificed, tender organizations squashed like pulp
        • No more Idealism: nature stripped of Platonic forms, shimmering archetypes, and the pathetic fallacy
        • Consciousness as lamp: against material Nature's indifference, only our brief light makes the contest fair
      • Reality, Violence, and Legacy
        • John Brown championed: the peaceable Thoreau extols the killer who acted against state-sanctioned violence
        • Petty violence: the community's so-called peace is preserved by daily deeds of violence
        • Reality over shams: "Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous"
        • Hard bottom: wading through opinion, prejudice, tradition, till we reach rocks in place called reality
        • Twin testaments: Leaves of Grass and Walden assure the New World of the unfettered self
  • Chapter 1 - Economy
    • Necessity, Simplicity, and Self-Emancipation (Chapter 1 - Economy · I)
      • The Experiment at Walden
        • Two years, two months: lived alone in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house he built
        • Living by hand labor: he earned his living by the work of his own hands only
        • First person retained: sincerity demands a true account of one's own life, not hearsay of others
        • Answering the townsmen: what he ate, whether he was lonesome or afraid, what he gave to charity
        • Addressed to poor students: others take only such portions as apply; the coat must fit its wearer
      • Lives of Quiet Desperation
        • Quiet desperation: the mass of men lead it; what is called resignation is confirmed desperation
        • Penance everywhere: neighbors in shops and fields endure austerities outdoing the twelve labors of Hercules
        • Inherited farms as misfortune: young men become serfs of the soil, digging graves from birth
        • Labor under a mistake: the better part of the man is ploughed into the soil for compost
        • No time to be a machine: toil leaves no leisure for integrity or the manliest relations to men
      • Debt and Self-Imposed Slavery
        • Living on borrowed brass: men die insolvent, eternally promising to pay tomorrow
        • Currying favor: lying, flattering, voting—small dishonesties to secure a neighbor's custom
        • Self-slavery worst: a southern overseer is hard, a northern worse, oneself worst of all
        • Private opinion: a stronger tyrant than public opinion; what a man thinks of himself shapes his fate
        • Self-emancipation: the needed Wilberforce rules the provinces of fancy and imagination
      • The Necessaries of Life
        • Definition: whatever few, whether savage, poor, or philosopher, ever attempt to do without
        • Four heads: Food, Shelter, Clothing, Fuel—only then can life's true problems be faced freely
        • Brutes need less: no creature of the brute creation requires more than food and shelter
        • Keeping warm: the grand necessity; the body is a stove, food its fuel, clothes and shelter its casing
        • Cheap tools: knife, axe, spade, wheelbarrow, lamplight, stationery, and a few books rank next
      • Luxuries and Voluntary Poverty
        • Hindrances: most luxuries and so-called comforts obstruct the elevation of mankind
        • Wisest live meagerly: ancient philosophers were poorest in outward riches, richest within
        • Vantage ground: only voluntary poverty lets one observe human life impartially and wisely
        • Professors, not philosophers: to be a philosopher is to live by wisdom—simplicity, independence, magnanimity, trust
        • Ahead of his age: the philosopher does not feed, shelter, or warm himself like his contemporaries
      • Untried Experience and Open Possibility
        • Age no instructor: the old have lost more than they gained; thirty years brought no earnest advice
        • No precedent binds: no way of thinking, however ancient, can be trusted without proof
        • Capacities unmeasured: man's powers cannot be judged by precedent, so little has been tried
        • Many radii, one centre: there are as many ways of living as lines drawn from a center
        • Look through another's eyes: no greater miracle exists; we should live all ages in an hour
    • The Business of Living Simply (Chapter 1 - Economy · II)
      • The Alternative to Superfluities
        • Beyond necessity: once life's necessities are secured, one may adventure on life now rather than accumulate more.
        • No rules for the strong: the valiant need no prescription; he speaks only to the discontented who might improve their lot.
        • Golden fetters: the wealthy who own dross without knowing how to use or shed it have forged their own chains.
      • Private Business in the Woods
        • Present at the dawn: he wished only to stand at the meeting of past and future, not to aid the sunrise.
        • Faithful inspector: self-appointed surveyor of snowstorms, forest paths, and the town's wild stock.
        • Lost hound, bay horse, dove: his true enterprises, pursued on the trail but never wholly recovered.
        • Walden as venture: he went not to live cheaply or dearly, but to transact private business with fewest obstacles.
      • The Basket Maker's Lesson
        • The Indian's baskets: making a thing is not enough; you must make it worth another's while to buy it.
        • Refused trade: instead of studying how to sell his baskets, he studied how to avoid needing to.
        • One kind of success: the life men praise is but one kind; no reason to exaggerate it at the others' expense.
      • Clothing Against Fashion
        • True utility: clothing exists first to retain vital heat, second to cover nakedness.
        • Patched clothes: no man stood lower for a patch, yet men dread a broken pantaloon more than a broken leg.
        • We know coats, not men: dress a scarecrow in your shift and rank would shift accordingly.
        • Fashion's authority: the head monkey at Paris puts on a cap, and all the monkeys in America follow.
      • New Clothes and the New Man
        • Beware new clothes: undertake enterprises in old ones; what is needed is a new wearer, not a new suit.
        • Moulting season: like fowl or snake, the change must come by internal expansion, a crisis in our lives.
        • Shirt as true bark: outer garments may be shed without harm; the shirt cannot go without destroying the man.
        • Cheap sufficiency: coat, pantaloons, boots, and hat for a few dollars let a man walk out empty-handed and unafraid.
      • Shelter and the Aim of Labor
        • House as convenience: shelter narrowed man's world to a fitted space; Adam and Eve wore the bower before other clothes.
        • Laplander's proof: men sleep on snow in skin bags and are no hardier than others — shelter is comfort, not necessity.
        • Corporate aim: the factory system serves to enrich corporations, not to clothe mankind well and honestly.
        • Aim high: in the long run men hit only what they aim at, so better to fail at something high.
    • The Cost of Shelter and Simplicity (Chapter 1 - Economy · III)
      • Shelter as Primitive Need
        • Warmth first: man wanted physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.
        • Child replays the race: every child begins the world again, playing house by instinct.
        • Domestic retreat: from cave to tiled roof, we forgot how to live in open air.
        • Slight shelter suffices: Penobscot tents in deep snow; a railroad box could shelter a free man.
        • No landlord dogging: a bare box frees a man from rent and leaves his soul free.
      • The True Cost of Shelter
        • Cost equals life: the cost of a thing is the amount of life exchanged for it.
        • Ten to fifteen years: an average house consumes over half a laborer's life.
        • Hiring no better: the savage owns his wigwam cheaply; the civilized man hires what he cannot own.
        • Half unowned: in civilized society not half of families own a shelter.
      • The Farmer's Trap
        • Endless toil: farmers labor twenty to forty years yet rarely own their farms free and clear.
        • House owns the man: we are often imprisoned rather than housed in our property.
        • Immovable houses: the bad neighborhood we cannot escape is our own scurvy selves.
        • Palaces without noblemen: civilization improved houses, not the men who inhabit them.
      • Luxury Balanced by Poverty
        • Counterbalanced classes: the luxury of one class is paid for by the indigence of another.
        • Palace and almshouse: pyramid-builders fed on garlic; the mason returns to a hut.
        • Civilized squalor: railroad shanties, English operatives, Ireland, and Southern slaves prove it.
        • Needlessly poor: men stay poor all their lives imitating the houses of their neighbors.
      • Simplicity Against Furniture
        • Furnished clutter: a good housewife would sweep most furniture into the dust hole.
        • Limestone lesson: three desk stones needed daily dusting—so he threw them out the window.
        • Open air: rather sit on a pumpkin alone than crowded on a velvet cushion.
        • Fashion from luxury: the luxurious set the fashions the herd diligently follows.
      • Man the Tool of His Tools
        • Sojourner lost: primitive life left man a traveler camping in nature for a night.
        • Tools of tools: men have become the tools of their tools, settled and forgetful of heaven.
        • Art needs stripped lives: beauty requires stripped walls and stripped lives as its foundation.
        • First settlers: ancestors satisfied pressing wants first, building houses only after bread came.
        • Spiritual bread: we still cut our spiritual bread thinner than our forefathers their wheaten.
        • Lined with beauty: houses should be lined with beauty like a shellfish, not overlaid with it.
    • Building a Life, Not a House (Chapter 1 - Economy · IV)
      • Building the Walden House
        • Borrowed axe: Thoreau returns it sharper, making his enterprise a shared interest with fellow men.
        • Spring labor: Cutting timber in March thaw, he feels the winter of discontent melting with the earth.
        • Timber hewing: He squares main timbers by hand, leaving bark; unsawn wood is straighter and stronger.
        • Snake thaw: A striped snake in cold water mirrors men torpid until a spring of springs rouses them.
        • Collins’s shanty: He buys an Irishman’s poor dwelling for boards, then carts it to the pond.
        • Cellar digging: Two hours digging into a hillside reveals man’s instinct for equable temperature.
      • The Architecture of Inwardness
        • Building own house: Like a bird’s nest, it develops the poetic faculty more than hired construction.
        • Division of labor: We surrender the pleasure of construction to carpenter, preacher, merchant, farmer.
        • Ornament from within: True architectural beauty grows out of the indweller’s necessities and character.
        • Hollow ornaments: Most architectural decoration is borrowed plumage a September gale would strip.
        • Humble dwellings: Log huts and cottages are picturesque because of the life they shelter, not surface.
        • Coffin architecture: Without an indwelling spirit, building becomes merely the architecture of the grave.
      • Shelter’s True Cost
        • Exact accounts: Thoreau lists every material cost to show how few know what their houses truly cost.
        • Student shelter: A student can obtain a lifelong shelter for roughly the annual rent he now pays.
        • Cambridge rent: A tiny college room costs thirty dollars yearly, with the disadvantage of noisy neighbors.
        • Education expense: Proper management would reduce the pecuniary cost of education, not increase it.
        • Illusory conveniences: The things students most want are rarely the things for which most money is demanded.
      • Living vs. Studying
        • Earnest living: Youths should not merely play at life while the community supports them; they should live it.
        • Practical learning: Better to make a jack-knife from ore than attend lectures on metallurgy.
        • Navigation farce: Thoreau “studied navigation” in college but would have learned more by one harbor turn.
        • Political economy: Colleges teach Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say while students run fathers into debt.
        • Leisure’s price: Shirked labor yields an ignoble leisure that defrauds the student of fruitful experience.
      • Modern Improvements and True Travel
        • Improved means, unimproved ends: Inventions are pretty toys distracting us from serious things.
        • Telegraph emptiness: Maine and Texas may have nothing important to communicate despite the wire.
        • Atlantic cable: Bringing worlds closer may only transmit trivial news like a princess’s whooping cough.
        • Swiftest traveller: The man who goes afoot arrives before the one earning his train fare.
        • Fitchburg race: Thirty miles on foot beats working a day to pay ninety cents fare.
        • Flying Childers: A fast horse carries no important message, no peck of corn to mill.
    • Simple Living Against False Progress (Chapter 1 - Economy · V)
      • The Railroad Illusion
        • Universal law: no man can outwit it, and the railroad is as broad as it is long.
        • Around the world: making the railroad available to all means grading the whole planet.
        • Joint-stock hope: crowds rush to ride cheaply, but few ride and the rest are run over.
        • Earned fare: most lose elasticity and desire before they can enjoy the travel.
        • Wasted lives: Englishman in India and Irish diggers spend best years for questionable gain.
      • The Bean-Field Economy
        • Two and a half acres: beans on light, sandy soil, with some potatoes, corn, peas, turnips.
        • Minimal cultivation: no manure, not quite hoed once, as a squatter not owner.
        • First-year balance: outgoes $14.72½, but independence and a house outweigh cash.
        • Second-year lesson: spading a third of an acre beat plowing and manuring.
        • Simple rule: raise only what you eat, avoid luxurious exchange, farm with left hand.
      • Independence from Ox and Farm
        • Not anchored: without house or farm, he could follow his crooked genius every moment.
        • Herds as keepers: men are not so much keepers of herds as herds are keepers of men.
        • Animal labor blunder: a nation of philosophers would not use animals' labor.
        • Slaves of the strongest: luxurious work with oxen makes a few exchange work for all.
        • Barn overshadows house: prosperity measured by outbuildings, not free worship or speech.
      • Monuments of Vanity
        • Hammered stone: nations seek immortality by the amount of stone they leave.
        • Vulgar grandeur: Thebes and Pyramids are tombs for ambitious boobies, not wisdom.
        • Bhagvat-Geeta: more admirable than all the ruins of the East.
        • Genius no retainer: a simple, independent mind does not toil at any prince's bidding.
        • Stones in place: an honest field wall is more sensible than hundred-gated Thebes.
      • Food, Bread, and Self-Sufficiency
        • Food cost: about twenty-seven cents a week; simple staples and water.
        • Simple diet: one may eat as simply as animals and retain health and strength.
        • Bread without leaven: scalding yeast proved it unnecessary; Cato's recipe used only meal and water.
        • Raise own grain: grow breadstuffs and grind them in a hand-mill.
        • Avoid trade: with food, shelter, clothing, fuel, one can escape most barter.
      • Furniture as Baggage
        • Simple furniture: bed, table, desk, three chairs, minimal utensils, a japanned lamp.
        • Furniture as trap: possessions are dragged like a trap, costing man his elasticity.
        • Dead set: a man is stuck when his sledge load cannot follow through a knot hole.
        • Butterfly in web: even the seemingly free are entangled by furniture, insured or stored.
        • England's baggage: an old gentleman traveling with trumpery he lacks courage to burn.
    • Simplicity, Solitude, and Unwanted Goodness (Chapter 1 - Economy · VI)
      • Light Burdens, Few Possessions
        • The trap: whatever a man must drag, let it be light and not nip him in a vital part
        • Wisest course: perhaps never to put one's paw into the trap at all
        • No curtains: nothing to shut out but sun and moon, and he is willing they look in
        • Declined the mat: no room to spare, no time to shake it; he wipes his feet on the sod
      • Purifying by Fire: The Busk
        • Avoid beginnings of evil: refuse the small accumulation before it becomes housekeeping
        • Deacon's auction: trumpery begun in his father's day sold, not burned, to lie in other garrets
        • Annual slough: savage nations at least act out the idea of yearly self-casting-off
        • Mucclasse busk: old goods heaped and burned, fires extinguished, three days of fasting, general amnesty
        • A truer sacrament: an outward and visible sign of inward grace, inspired directly from Heaven
      • Earning a Living Lightly
        • Six weeks a year: five years of hand labor proved all living expenses could be so met
        • Free winters: all winter and most of summer left clear and unencumbered for study
        • School-keeping and trade: both failures; dressing to income, and trade curses everything it handles
        • Huckleberry picking: least capital, least distraction, and the simplest conceivable livelihood
        • Day-laborer's independence: thirty or forty days' work a year; the day ends with the sun
      • Each in His Own Way
        • No adoption: he would not have anyone adopt his mode of living on any account
        • Own way: each must find and pursue his own, not his father's, mother's, or neighbor's
        • Polestar: a mathematical point of wisdom suffices to keep the true course for a lifetime
        • Solitary dwelling: the common wall is cheap mainly by virtue of a bad neighbor
        • Cooperation: commonly partial and superficial; the man who goes alone can start today
      • Philanthropy's Cant
        • Doing-good: a crowded profession, tried fairly and found against his constitution
        • Set about being good: rather than going about doing good with kindness aforethought
        • Goodness tainted: no odor so bad; it is human, it is divine, carrion
        • Hundred Howards: philanthropy that cannot help us in our best estate is a Newfoundland dog's work
        • False accounting: he who bestows most time and money may produce the misery he strives to relieve
      • Charity as Overflow, Not Effort
        • Flower and fruit: uprightness and benevolence are stem and leaves; he wants fragrance and ripeness
        • Constant superfluity: goodness must cost nothing and be unconscious of itself
        • Impart health: give courage and ease, not despair and disease, lest they spread by contagion
        • The reformer's ail: what saddens him is not sympathy but his private dyspepsia
        • The Irish laborer: three pairs of pants beneath his rags; a flannel shirt for Thoreau was the greater charity
        • Azad like the cypress: bear no fruit, flourish always; be liberal as the date tree, or free as the cypress
  • Chapter 2 - Where I Lived, and What I Lived for
    • Owning in Imagination, Waking at Dawn (Chapter 2 - Where I Lived, and What I Lived for · I)
      • Surveying the Country
        • Every spot a possible house site: in certain seasons every place seems the site of a house
        • Buying every farm in succession: he took everything but a deed, tasting wild apples, discoursing on husbandry
        • Wherever I sat, there I might live: the landscape radiated from him; friends named him a real-estate broker
        • An afternoon sufficed: to lay out orchard, woodlot, and pasture—then let it lie fallow
      • Rich in What You Let Alone
        • Wealth is what you can let alone: a man is rich in proportion to things he can afford to leave fallow
        • The refusal was all I wanted: he never got his fingers burned by actual possession
        • The Hollowell Place: the owner's wife changed her mind; he gave back farm and ten dollars, keeping the landscape
        • A poet's invisible fence: the poet impounds a farm in rhyme, takes the cream, leaves the farmer skimmed milk
        • Rich without damage to my poverty: he kept his ten cents, his seeds, his wheelbarrow materials
      • Live Free and Uncommitted
        • Live free and uncommitted: being committed to a farm differs little from the county jail
        • Cato's counsel: don't buy greedily; go round and round the farm as long as you live
        • Seeds improve with age: time discriminates good from bad; late planting risks less disappointment
        • Brag like chanticleer: he writes no ode to dejection, only a crow to wake his neighbors
      • The House in the Woods
        • Independence Day, 1845: he began living in the woods, his house unfinished, only a defence against rain
        • Airy and unplastered: mountain winds passed over it; Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere
        • A crystallization around me: the frame reacted on its builder; the air within kept its freshness
        • Neighbor to the birds: he caged himself near wood-thrush, veery, tanager, whippoorwill—no villager's serenade
      • The Pond and the Vast Horizon
        • A tarn high on a mountainside: at dawn mists withdrew like ghosts; dew hung late into the day
        • A lower heaven: in August stillness the light-filled pond became a second sky
        • Water makes the earth insular: even the smallest well shows earth is not continent but island
        • Pasture enough for my imagination: the far shore stretched toward western prairies and the steppes of Tartary
        • A site among the stars: his house stood as remote as the Pleiades; to his neighbor he twinkled faintly
      • Morning and Awakening
        • Bathing as religious exercise: rising early and bathing in the pond was one of the best things he did
        • Renew thyself completely each day: King Tching-thang's bathing-tub motto—again, and again, forever again
        • The mosquito as Homer's requiem: its faint hum was an Iliad and Odyssey of the world's vigor
        • Awakened by our Genius, not factory bells: a day begun by mechanical nudging is little worth
        • Morning is when I am awake: not what clocks say; moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep
    • Awakening, Simplicity, and the Search for Reality (Chapter 2 - Where I Lived, and What I Lived for · II)
      • The Duty of Awakening
        • To be awake is to be alive: millions are awake for labor; barely one in a million for intellectual exertion
        • Moral reawakening: not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn that never forsakes us
        • Conscious endeavor: man's unquestionable ability to elevate his life by conscious effort is the most encouraging fact
        • The highest art: to affect the quality of the day, to paint the very atmosphere through which we look
        • Every man's task: to make his life, in its smallest details, worthy of his most elevated hour
      • Living Deliberately
        • Why the woods: to live deliberately, front only the essential facts of life, and learn what it had to teach
        • Fear of unlived life: lest, coming to die, he discover that he had not lived
        • Refusing resignation: he would not live what was not life, since living is so dear
        • The marrow of life: to live sturdily and Spartan-like, drive life into a corner, reduce it to lowest terms
        • One honest account: if life proved mean, publish its meanness; if sublime, know it by experience
      • Simplify, Simplify
        • Life frittered away by detail: an honest man hardly needs more than fingers and toes to count
        • Affairs as two or three: keep your accounts on your thumbnail, not a million churning items
        • Reduce in proportion: one meal instead of three, five dishes instead of a hundred
        • A German Confederacy: life made of petty states with boundaries forever fluctuating
        • A rigid economy: the cure for household and nation alike is stern simplicity and elevation of purpose
      • The Railroad Rides Upon Us
        • We do not ride the railroad: it rides upon us; the hurry we mistake for progress masters us
        • The sleepers are men: each railroad tie beneath the rails is an Irishman or a Yankee
        • Ridden upon: if some enjoy the ride, others suffer the misfortune of being ridden over
        • Starved before hungry: a Saint Vitus' dance of hurry, a thousand stitches taken to save nine
      • News, Gossip, and the Never-Old
        • "What's the news?": men wake from naps demanding tidings, as if mankind stood their sentinels
        • The post-office dispensable: he never received more than one or two letters worth the postage
        • One instance is enough: a single murder, fire, or wreck teaches the principle; a myriad add nothing
        • All news is gossip: the philosopher scorns it; editors and readers are old women over their tea
        • Nothing new abroad: a ready wit could write the Spanish report a twelvemonth beforehand, accurately
      • Reality Versus Shams
        • Reality is fabulous: shams and delusions pass for soundest truths, while the true is deemed incredible
        • Children discern better: those who play life see its true law more clearly than men who trust experience
        • Penetrate the surface: our vision stops at appearances; a true gaze would dissolve meeting-house, court-house, jail
        • Here and now: God culminates in the present moment, never more divine through all the lapse of ages
        • The Realometer: settle through mud of opinion and tradition till you strike hard bottom and call it reality
        • Time is a stream: he drinks at it, sees the sandy bottom, yet eternity remains; crave only reality
  • Chapter 3 - Reading
    • The Noble Exercise of Reading
      • Reading as exercise: true reading tasks the reader more than any exercise the customs esteem.
      • Deliberate and reserved: books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
      • Lifelong training: true reading requires steady intention almost of a whole life, like athletes' training.
      • Alert wakefulness: stand on tiptoe and devote most alert hours; not a luxury that lulls.
      • Immortal truth: in dealing with truth we are immortal; no time elapsed since divinity revealed.
    • Written Language and the Written Word
      • Father tongue: written language is reserved, select expression, unlike transitory mother tongue.
      • Writer over orator: orator speaks to transient crowd; writer speaks to intellect and heart of all ages.
      • Stars behind clouds: noblest written words stand above fleeting speech as firmament behind clouds.
      • Written word as relic: choicest relic, art nearest life; Alexander carried Iliad in a precious casket.
      • Books as inheritance: treasured wealth of the world, fit inheritance of generations, on every cottage shelf.
    • Classics and Ancient Languages
      • Classics as oracles: noblest recorded thoughts, only undecayed oracles answering modern inquiry.
      • Heroic books: even in mother tongue remain dead language to degenerate times; require labor.
      • Read in original: student may read Homer or Æschylus in Greek, emulating heroes in morning hours.
      • Translations fall short: cheap fertile press and translations do little to bring us nearer ancients.
      • No modern transcript: no true transcript of classics into modern tongue; civilization is imperfect transcript.
    • The Failure of Easy Reading
      • Reading for convenience: most learn to read to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade.
      • Stuck at primers: readers repeat a b abs on lowest form; Little Reading and story books suffice.
      • Novel gluttony: cormorants and ostriches digest all; result is dullness and stagnation of faculties.
      • False literacy: even college-bred lack classics; little distinction between nonreader and reader of children's books.
      • Great poets unread: only great poets can read them; most read stars astrologically, not astronomically.
    • Reading's Transformative Power
      • New era: many date a new era in life from reading a book.
      • Words for our condition: words addressed exactly to us may be more salutary than morning or spring.
      • Universal questions: questions that puzzle us occurred to all wise men; each answered by words and life.
      • Learn liberality: with wisdom we learn liberality; commune with Zoroaster and Jesus Christ.
      • Illiterate trader: even the trader seeks intellectual culture for his children, becoming founder of a family.
    • Villages as Uncommon Schools
      • Mental aliment neglected: we spend more on bodily aliment or ailment than on mental aliment.
      • Education stops too soon: common schools are for infants; we leave off education when becoming men and women.
      • Village university: villages should be universities, elders fellows pursuing liberal studies all their lives.
      • Village as patron: town spends seventeen thousand on town-house, little on living wit; village should hire wise men.
      • Arch over ignorance: omit a bridge if necessary, but throw one arch over the darker gulf of ignorance.
  • Chapter 4 - Sounds
    • Alertness, Reverie, and the Iron Horse (Chapter 4 - Sounds · I)
      • The Language Beyond Books
        • Living language: books are provincial dialects; all things and events speak a copious language without metaphor
        • Perpetual alertness: no method or discipline can supersede being forever on the alert
        • Reader or seer: the question is whether you will remain a student merely, or become a seer
        • Bloom of the present: he could not sacrifice the moment's bloom to work of head or hands
        • Broad margin: he loves a broad margin to his life, unclaimed space around every activity
      • Reverie and the Unmeasured Day
        • First summer: he did not read books, he hoed beans — and often did better than that
        • Like corn in the night: reverie was growth, not time subtracted from life's allowance
        • Forsaking works: he realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation
        • Days without clocks: no deity's stamp, no hours minced and fretted by ticking
        • Life as drama: at home his life itself became amusement, scenes without end
        • Follow your genius: tracked closely enough, it shows a fresh prospect every hour
      • Housework as Pastime
        • Pleasant pastime: housework became delight rather than drudgery
        • Furniture outdoors: the whole household set on the grass, a little pile like a gypsy's pack
        • Meditations unbroken: floor scrubbed and sanded, dried by sunrise before villagers broke fast
        • Objects in the open: familiar things look more interesting outdoors; their forms came from the woods
      • The Wild Yard
        • Hillside siting: house on the edge of a young pine and hickory wood, steps from the pond
        • Front-yard flora: strawberry, blackberry, johnswort, golden-rod, shrub-oak, sand-cherry
        • Sand-cherry: delicate umbelled flowers, then handsome cherries tasted out of compliment to Nature
        • Sumach's excess: grew five or six feet in a season; tender boughs broke under their own weight
        • Window pageant: hawks, pigeons, fishhawk, mink seizing a frog, bending sedge — a voice to the air
      • The Iron Horse
        • Fitchburg Railroad: touches the pond a hundred rods south; its causeway is his link to society
        • Track-repairer: freight men bow to him; "I too would fain be a track-repairer" somewhere on earth
        • Cloud-compeller: the engine seems a demigod — if only its enterprise were as noble as it is early
        • Atropos: the railroad is a constructed fate that never turns aside; keep on your own track
        • Railroad time: startings and arrivals are the epochs of the village day; farmers set clocks by them
      • Commerce's Steady Valor
        • Enterprise and bravery: commerce does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter
        • Snow-plough courage: steadier than standing in a battle line, sleeping only when the storm sleeps
        • Fragrant freight: odors from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain recall coral reefs and the globe's extent
    • Distant Sounds and Unfenced Nature (Chapter 4 - Sounds · II)
      • The Train as Legible Commerce
        • Freight as text: torn sails and rents write the history of storms more graphically than printed books
        • Proof-sheets needing no correction: the weathered canvas is its own accurate record
        • World gathered at the door: palm-leaf, Manilla hemp, Thomaston lime, Spanish hides arrive together
        • Rags to paper: cast-off dress becomes paper for tales of "real life," founded on fact
        • Salt fish: the strong New England commercial scent, cured so thoroughly nothing can spoil it
        • Spanish hides: tails still holding their twist — a type of obstinacy, proving vices almost incurable
      • The Cattle Train and the Vanishing Pastoral
        • Air filled with bleating: calves, sheep, and oxen pass as if a pastoral valley were going by
        • Mountains skip like rams: the old bell-wether's rattle turns scripture into literal passing landscape
        • Drovers' vocation gone: they ride level with their droves, clinging to useless sticks as badges of office
        • Dogs thrown out: thrown off the scent, they slink to kennels or strike a league with wolf and fox
        • Pastoral life whirled away: the whole shepherd's world is carried off by steam
      • Refusing the Railroad
        • "What's the railroad to me?": he never goes to see where it ends
        • A minor fact on the land: it fills hollows, banks for swallows, sets blackberries growing
        • Crossed like a cart-path: no ceremony, no awe — the track is simply stepped over
        • Eyes and ears preserved: he will not have them put out by smoke, steam, and hissing
        • Deeper solitude after: with the restless world gone, the pond's fishes cease to feel the rumbling
      • Distance, Echo, and the Universal Lyre
        • Sunday bells: Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, Concord — faint, sweet melody worth importing into the wilderness
        • Vibratory hum: across the woods the sound sweeps pine needles as if they were harp strings
        • Echo is partly original: not mere repetition but the voice of the wood, a wood-nymph singing
        • The distant cow: mistaken for minstrels, then welcomed as the cheap and natural music of the cow
      • Night Voices: Whippoorwills and Owls
        • Whippoorwills' precision: vespers begin within five minutes of a set time, chanted half an hour by the door
        • Heard near at hand: the cluck after each note, the buzzing like a fly in a spider's web
        • Screech owls: a solemn graveyard ditty, the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets that would be sung
        • Hooting owl in two registers: melancholic close up, genuinely melodious made so by distance
        • "I rejoice that there are owls": let them do the idiotic hooting for men; they voice unsatisfied thoughts
      • Bullfrogs, Cockerels, and the Absence of Domestic Sound
        • Bullfrogs as ancient wine-bibbers: unrepentant wassailers passing the bowl with tr-r-r-oonk across the shore
        • Cock-crowing never heard: he thought it worth keeping a cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird
        • Chanticleer: health ever good, lungs sound, spirits never flag — more indigenous even than the natives
        • No domestic sounds: no dog, cat, cow, pig, churn, spinning wheel, kettle, or crying children
        • Unfenced Nature to the sill: squirrels, whippoorwill, loon, fox — no yard, no gate, no path to the civilized world
  • Chapter 5 - Solitude
    • The Delicious Evening
      • Whole body one sense: strolling the stony shore in shirt sleeves, delight imbibed through every pore
      • Sympathy with the alder and poplar: like the lake, his serenity is rippled but not ruffled
      • Nature's watchmen: fox, skunk, and rabbit roam now without fear; the repose is never complete
      • Æolian music: no storm so fierce it is not music to a healthy, innocent ear
      • Vulgar sadness: nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to it
    • Enough Space, Traces of Visitors
      • Visitors' cards: absent callers leave flowers, evergreen wreaths, or names penciled on leaves
      • Reading traces: bended twigs, footprints, a lingering pipe odor betray who passed and when
      • Horizon never at our elbows: the wood and pond are not at the door; something is always cleared
      • Nearest neighbor a mile distant: it is as much Asia or Africa as New England—his own sun and stars
    • The One Hour of Doubt
      • Lonely only once: weeks after arriving, he doubted for an hour that human neighborhood was essential
      • Slight insanity: he recognized the mood's madness and foresaw his own recovery
      • Pattering rain: an infinite, unaccountable friendliness sustained him like an atmosphere
      • Every pine needle swelled with sympathy; the nearest of blood was not a person nor a villager
      • Long rain storms: pleasantest hours, when thoughts took root; his house, all entry, enjoyed its protection
    • Solitude Is Not Measured in Miles
      • Earth but a point in space: why feel lonely, when our planet is in the Milky Way?
      • No exertion of the legs brings two minds much nearer to one another
      • Dwell near the perennial source of life, as the willow sends its roots to water; dig your cellar there
      • Next to us is the workman whose work we are, not the workman we hired
      • Confucius: virtue does not remain an abandoned orphan; it must have neighbors
      • Cambridge student in the crowded hive is as solitary as a dervish in the desert
    • The Sane Doubleness of Thought
      • Beside ourselves in a sane sense: by conscious effort the mind stands aloof from actions and consequences
      • Drift-wood or Indra: we are not wholly involved in Nature; we may watch from the sky
      • The spectator self: a part of me that is not a part of me, sharing no experience, only noting it
      • Poor neighbors: this doubleness may make us poor friends sometimes
    • Company Without Company
      • Companionable solitude: he never found a companion so companionable; company, even the best, is wearisome
      • Lonelier among men than in our chambers; a man thinking or working is always alone
      • Society too cheap: three meals daily serve the same musty cheese; etiquette prevents open war
      • No more lonely than the loon, Walden Pond, the sun, God himself, a mullein or the north star
      • Winter visitors: the old settler who dug the pond, the elderly dame of the herb garden
      • Morning air: Nature's true panacea; he worships Hebe's restoring spring, not Hygeia's physic
  • Chapter 6 - Visitors
    • Society, Solitude, and Simple Hospitality (Chapter 6 - Visitors · I)
      • The Three Chairs
        • Three chairs: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society — a scale for company.
        • No hermit: Thoreau claims he loves society and could out-sit the sturdiest bar-room frequenter.
        • Small house, many souls: twenty-five or thirty under one roof, parting without ever truly meeting.
        • Great men in small houses: it is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain.
      • Houses Too Large
        • Vast mansions: public and private houses seem extravagantly large for their inhabitants.
        • Inhabitants as vermin: dwellers in huge halls and cellars appear merely vermin infesting them.
        • The ridiculous mouse: a grand hotel blows its summons, and out creeps one ridiculous mouse.
      • Room for Thoughts
        • Thoughts need sea-room: ideas must get into sailing trim and run a course before making port.
        • The bullet of thought: it must settle into steady flight before reaching the hearer's ear.
        • Neutral ground: individuals, like nations, need broad natural boundaries between them.
        • Talking across the pond: a singular luxury — distance permits speech that closeness destroys.
        • Speech for the hard of hearing: there are many fine things we cannot say if we must shout.
      • Hospitality Without Dinner
        • The pine wood: his best withdrawing room, ready for distinguished guests, swept by a priceless domestic.
        • Abstinence as hospitality: with twenty guests no dinner was mentioned, and this offended no one.
        • New customs: it is easy to establish better ways; do not rest your reputation on the dinners you give.
        • Cerberus of parade: elaborate dining is the surest deterrence from ever revisiting a house.
        • Massassoit's lodge: having nothing to eat, the Indians said nothing and drew their belts tighter.
        • Spenser's motto: "The noblest mind the best contentment has," inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf.
      • Visitors Winnowed by Distance
        • Company winnowed: living in the woods filtered out trivial business and trivial callers.
        • Finest sediment: withdrawn into the ocean of solitude, only the finest sediment settled around him.
        • Unexplored continents: wafted to him were evidences of uncultivated continents on the other side.
      • The Woodchopper
        • Homeric man: a Canadian wood-chopper, simple and natural, with a poetic name Thoreau cannot print.
        • Homer without understanding: he reveres Homer though he does not know what the writing is about.
        • Unhurried labor: he was not going to hurt himself; he did not care if he only earned his board.
        • Mirth without alloy: a well of good humor and contentment that overflowed at his eyes.
        • Never tired: "I never was tired in my life" — cousin to the pine and the rock.
        • Slumbering spirit: the intellectual and spiritual man in him slept as in an infant.
    • Unlettered Wisdom and Visiting Crowds (Chapter 6 - Visitors · II)
      • The Canadian Woodchopper: A Natural Child
        • Nature's portion: a strong body, contentment, and reverence propping him for threescore years and ten
        • Genuine and unsophisticated: no introduction could present him, any more than a woodchuck to your neighbor
        • No part to play: men paid him wages, but he never exchanged opinions with them
        • Effortless humility: he never aspired, so humility was no distinct quality in him
      • Reverence Without Consciousness
        • Demigods: wiser men seemed to him so grand they would take all responsibility themselves
        • Never heard praise: he lived without the sound of praise, reverencing writer and preacher as miracle-workers
        • Writing thoughts: he could not tell what to put first — "it would kill him" — and then there was spelling
        • Innocent instruction: taught only to trust and reverence, a child is kept a child, never made a man
      • Practical Wisdom Without Philosophy
        • No to reform: asked if he wanted the world changed, he chuckled, "No, I like it well enough"
        • Only books: an almanac and an arithmetic — the almanac a sort of cyclopædia of human knowledge
        • Money defended: mortgaging the ox piecemeal for needles and thread explained its origin better than philosophers
        • Plato's man: the plucked cock failed the definition because its knees bent the wrong way
      • A Mind Immersed in Animal Life
        • No spiritual view: the highest he conceived was simple expediency, as an animal might appreciate
        • Work fills the mind: a man hoeing must think of weeds, or lose the ideas he already had
        • Satisfied: some men satisfied with one thing, some with another — back to the fire, belly to the table
        • Too late: suggested improvements met no regret, only the answer that it was too late
      • Originality in the Lowest Grades of Life
        • Thinking for himself: so rare a phenomenon Thoreau would walk ten miles to observe it
        • Re-origination: his own opinion amounted to refounding many institutions of society
        • Always a thought behind: though he hesitated and failed to speak distinctly, something presentable was there
        • Bottomless as Walden: genius may dwell in the humblest and illiterate, dark and muddy
      • The Migrating Season's Visitors
        • Annual visitation: about the first of April everybody is on the move, and he had his share
        • Half-witted men: making wit the theme, he found some wiser than the overseers of the poor
        • The simple pauper: "deficient in intellect," said with truth; in proportion as he humbled himself he was exalted
        • Objects of charity are not guests: he required a visitor not be actually starving, however good the appetite
        • Specimens: runaway slaves, men of one idea like a hen with one duckling, men of a thousand ideas
      • What Visitors Reveal
        • The young: girls and boys glad to be in the woods, looking in the pond and at the flowers
        • Men of business: professed love of rambling, yet thought only of solitude and their distance from something
        • The timid: the old and infirm saw life as danger, the village a league for mutual defence
        • Reformers: the greatest bores, believing he forever sang "This is the house that I built"
        • Welcome guests: honest pilgrims who left the village behind — children berrying, fishermen, poets, philosophers
  • Chapter 7 - The Bean-Field
    • Small Herculean Labor
      • Small Herculean labor: seven miles of rows, impatient to be hoed, become a work he cannot put off.
      • Attachment to earth: loving his rows, he gains strength like Antaeus; what shall he learn of beans, or beans of him?
      • Auxiliaries and enemies: dews and rains water the lean soil; worms, cool days, and woodchucks — worst of all — devour it.
      • Moral in drudgery: hand-labor at drudgery's verge is never the worst idleness; to the scholar it yields a classic result.
    • The Field Between Wild and Cultivated
      • Earth made to say beans: daily work coaxes yellow soil to express itself in bean leaves rather than wormwood and grass.
      • Slowness brings intimacy: without horses, cattle, hired help, or better tools, he worked slower and knew his beans more intimately.
      • Judged by passers-by: travellers rate his late, manureless field aloud against their own, teaching him his rank in agriculture.
      • A connecting link: his field lies between wild and cultivated, and his beans cheerfully return to their primitive state.
      • The thrasher's top dressing: the brown-thrasher's song is a cheap fertilizer he trusts more than ashes or plaster.
    • The Hoe's Wider Vision
      • Arrowheads in the furrows: his hoe turns up weapons of extinct nations who planted corn and beans before white men came.
      • Instant, immeasurable crop: tinkling against stones, the hoe's music echoes to woods and sky beyond any harvest.
      • Dissolved in the work: no longer beans that he hoed, nor he that hoed beans; he pities the oratorio-goers.
      • Nature's kindredship: night-hawk, hen-hawks embodying his thoughts, wild pigeons, a spotted salamander — inexhaustible entertainment.
      • Distant guns: town cannon sounds like a puffball or swarming bees; hoeing on, he trusts the future and Massachusetts's liberties.
    • The Weed War and the Craft
      • War with weeds: pigweed, sorrel, piper-grass are Trojans with sun, rain, and dew on their side; he levels their ranks.
      • Farmed for tropes: no hunger for beans — a Pythagorean who traded them for rice — but to serve a parable-maker.
      • Rare amusement: bean-raising was a pastime that, continued too long, might have become a dissipation.
      • Earth's magnetism: Evelyn's continual turning of the mould beats any compost; Digby's earth draws vital spirits from the air.
      • Sowing and reaping: plant bush beans about June first, rows three feet by eighteen inches; harvest early; twelve bushels.
    • Seeds of Virtue That Would Not Sprout
      • A better crop: he resolves to plant sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, and innocence instead of beans.
      • Worm-eaten seed: those virtues, if indeed planted, had lost their vitality and did not come up.
      • Planting by fate: men are only as brave or timid as their fathers; an old man still makes hoe-holes for the seventieth time.
      • Seeds for the nation: ambassadors should send home truth and sincerity; meeting a man who embodies them is conversing with an angel.
    • Husbandry's Lost Sacredness
      • Once a sacred art: ancient poetry calls husbandry holy; Cato and Varro held its profits especially pious.
      • No festival, no ceremony: farmers express no sense of their calling's sacredness; Ceres is abandoned for the infernal Plutus.
      • Soil as property: avarice deforms the landscape, degrades husbandry, and makes the farmer know Nature only as a robber.
      • The sun's equal gaze: it lights cultivated fields and wild prairies alike; the earth is all one garden.
      • Relinquished harvest: the true husbandman ceases from anxiety, sacrificing even his last fruits; weeds feed the birds.
  • Chapter 8 - The Village
    • The Village as Spectacle
      • Gossip as tonic: taken in homoeopathic doses, as refreshing as rustling leaves and peeping frogs
      • Village as news room: its vitals are the grocery, bar-room, post-office, and bank
      • Men like prairie dogs: sitting at burrow mouths, running to a neighbor's to gossip
      • Coarsest mills: idlers outdoors first crudely digest gossip before it pours into finer hoppers indoors
    • Running the Gauntlet
      • Houses as machinery: arranged in lanes so every traveler runs the gantlet and gets a lick
      • Signs as hooks: tavern catches the appetite, dry goods the fancy, barber and tailor by hair and skirts
      • Escape by boldness: proceed straight to the goal, or keep thoughts on high things like Orpheus
      • Rear avenues: enter for the last sieveful of news, then slip out the back to the woods
    • The Night Journey Home
      • Launching into night: sail from a bright parlor with rye on the shoulder, outer man at the helm
      • Darker in the woods: look up at the tree opening, or feel with the feet the faint worn track
      • The body's memory: feet find the path the eyes cannot; the hand finds the mouth unaided
      • Lost near home: two fishermen wandered all night close by their own premises
    • The Value of Being Lost
      • Familiar turned strange: a well-known road in snow becomes as alien as a road in Siberia
      • Unconscious bearings: we steer by beacons and headlands without knowing it
      • Only when lost: not till we have lost the world do we begin to find ourselves
      • Compass relearned: every man must learn his points of direction again each time he awakes
    • The Jail and the Unbolted Door
      • Jailed for taxes: seized for refusing to recognize a state that buys and sells men like cattle
      • Dirty institutions: wherever a man goes, men paw him, seeking to constrain him into their society
      • The unlocked house: no bolt, door never fastened, yet respected more than if ringed with soldiers
      • Simplicity ends theft: robbery exists only where some have too much and others too little
  • Chapter 9 - The Ponds
    • Purity, Solitude, and Deep Time (Chapter 9 - The Ponds · I)
      • Wild Fruit and Direct Experience
        • Plucked flavor: wild fruit yields its true taste only to the plucker, cow-boy, or partridge.
        • Vulgar error: to think you have tasted huckleberries if you never plucked them.
        • Market loss: the ambrosial part vanishes with the bloom rubbed off in market carts.
        • Eternal Justice: no innocent huckleberry can be transported to Boston while justice reigns.
        • Westward retreat: surfeited with society, Thoreau rambles to fresh woods and pastures new.
      • Silent Companionship and Night Fishing
        • Wordless harmony: with a deaf fisherman, shared silence pleases more than speech.
        • Echoing woods: paddle strikes raise circling sound until every wooded vale growls.
        • Flute and perch: evening flute playing charms perch while the moon travels over the ribbed bottom.
        • Midnight line: anchored in forty feet, a faint jerk links cosmic thoughts back to Nature.
        • Two fishes: a line cast downward and upward seems to catch two fishes with one hook.
      • Walden's Form and Changing Colors
        • Deep green well: half-mile long, 1.75-mile circumference, 61.5 acres, spring-fed with no visible inlet or outlet.
        • Humble grandeur: wooded hills rise abruptly forty to eighty feet, higher on southeast and east.
        • Two waters: Concord waters show one color at distance, another close at hand.
        • Partakes both: Walden lies between earth and heavens, blue at one time, green at another.
        • Iris of the pond: near shore yellowish sand, then light green deepening to dark green.
        • Glass and body: a glass of Walden water is colorless as air; large plates of glass show green tint.
      • Transparency, Purity, and Ancient Continuity
        • Crystalline depth: bottom visible at twenty-five or thirty feet; fish seen far below surface.
        • Axe suspended: dropped axe stands on its head, helve swaying with the pond's pulse.
        • Clean shore: steep white stones, pure sand, few weeds; bather appears alabaster white.
        • White Pond kin: only White Pond shares Walden's pure, well-like character.
        • Pellucid eternity: successive nations drink and pass; water remains green and pellucid as ever.
        • Aboriginal path: a shelf-like path circles the pond, worn by aboriginal hunters and reprinted by snow.
      • Fluctuation and the Deep Springs
        • Unknown cycle: pond rises and falls, higher in winter, lower in summer, but period unknown.
        • Personal measure: Thoreau remembers it five feet higher and a foot or two lower.
        • Drowned landmarks: a chowder sand-bar and a wooded cove became unfishable, then meadow.
        • Deep springs: watershed is insignificant; overflow must come from causes affecting deep springs.
        • Sympathetic ponds: Flint's, White, and smaller ponds rise and fall together with Walden.
        • Cleansing rise: high water kills encroaching shrubs and trees, leaving an unobstructed shore.
    • Earth's Eye and Forest Mirror (Chapter 9 - The Ponds · II)
      • The Shore the Pond Claims
        • Fluctuation as title: the pond asserts ownership of its shore, and the shore is shorn
        • Trees loosened: alders, willows, maples send fibrous red roots into the water to hold themselves
        • Blueberry windfall: shore bushes that commonly bear no fruit yield an abundant crop when water is high
        • The Indian legend: a pow-wow hill sank; only old squaw Walden escaped, and the pond took her name
        • "I detect the paver": the same stones fill the surrounding hills, thickest where the shore is abrupt
      • Walden as a Well Ready Dug
        • Pure and cold: four months a year the water is as cold as it is pure at all times
        • Winter inversion: water exposed to the air is colder than springs and wells protected from it
        • Measured: March 1846, the pond stood at 42°, a degree colder than the coldest well just drawn
        • Depth resists heat: in summer Walden never warms as shallow, sun-exposed water does
        • Kept fresh: a week-old pailful tasted as good as the day it was dipped, with no taste of the pump
      • Fish, and the Life of the Pond
        • Pickerel its boast: not abundant, but chief; one weighed seven pounds, another claimed at eight
        • Three kinds: a shallow steel-colored one, a bright golden deep one, a spotted golden one
        • Firmer flesh: Walden's fish are cleaner, handsomer, and firmer than those of the river
        • Clean race of creatures: frogs, tortoises, mussels, muskrats, minks, a visiting mud-turtle
        • Birds about it: ducks, geese, swallows, kingfishers, peetweets; at most one annual loon
        • Pleasant mystery: circular heaps of small stones on the bottom, too regular and fresh for Indians
      • A Lake Is Earth's Eye
        • Irregular shore: deep western bays, a bolder north, overlapping southern capes and unexplored coves
        • Best seen from water: a lake amid hills gives the forest its finest setting and natural boundary
        • Natural selvage: the eye rises by just gradations from low shore shrubs to the highest trees
        • Few traces of man: the water laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago
        • Earth's eye: looking into a lake, the beholder measures the depth of his own nature
        • Eyelashes and brows: shore trees fringe the water; wooded hills and cliffs overhang it
      • The Glassy Surface
        • Thread of gossamer: on a hazy September afternoon the lake reads as glassy surface
        • Molten glass: cooled but not congealed; its few motes are pure like imperfections in glass
        • Every disturbance advertised: a leaping fish sends circling undulations half a dozen rods wide
        • Skaters and water-bugs: they furrow the calm, and vanish when the surface is agitated
        • Soothing employment: from a stump, study the dimpling circles; joy and pain are alike thrills
        • A perfect forest mirror: no stone can crack it, no storm dim it; impurity sinks, and Nature repairs its gilding
      • Water, Spirit of the Air
        • Needs no fence: nations come and go without defiling it; it remains sky water
        • Intermediate nature: lying between land and sky, water itself is rippled by the wind
        • Looking down: perhaps we shall at length look down on the surface of air as on water
        • Late autumn silence: by November the skaters are gone and nothing ripples the surface
        • November perch: myriads of bronze perch dimple the pond before winter draws its icy shutter
        • Fish as flight: in transparent, seemingly bottomless water they hover like a flock of birds, fins set like sails
    • Walden's Purity and the Iron Horse (Chapter 9 - The Ponds · III)
      • Walden Unchanged, Man Changed
        • The pond outlasts its visitors: woodchoppers, railroad, and ice-men scar the shore, yet the water itself is unchanged
        • Change is in the observer: after all its ripples Walden has acquired no permanent wrinkle; all the change is in me
        • Perennial youth: the same swallow dips, the same thought wells up as when he first discovered it
        • Work of a brave man: one without guile rounded this water with his hand and bequeathed it to Concord
      • Vanished Past of the Shore
        • The old log canoe: two white-pine logs pinned together, clumsy and ownerless; it belonged to the pond
        • Legend of the iron chest: the potter saw it; it floats to shore, then retreats to deep water when approached
        • Amphitheatre of woods: steep shores, lofty pines, grape-vine bowers under which a boat could pass
        • Woodchoppers laid it waste: the aisles of the wood are gone; how can birds sing when their groves are cut down?
      • Idle Hours as True Wealth
        • Drifting awake: lying on his back across the seats, roused only when the boat touched sand
        • Idleness as productive industry: the most attractive and productive way to spend a forenoon
        • Rich in sunny hours: he spent his summer days lavishly and regrets not wasting more in workshop or teacher's desk
      • The Iron Horse and Piped Water
        • Walden by pipe: villagers propose to bring its water, sacred as the Ganges, to wash their dishes
        • That devilish Iron Horse: its neigh muddies the Boiling Spring and browses off the woods on Walden shore
        • A Trojan horse: a thousand men in its belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks
        • Where is the country's champion?: he calls for a Moore of Moore Hall to thrust a lance between the ribs of the pest
      • Flint's Pond: Names and Property
        • Poverty of nomenclature: a lake named for an unclean farmer whose shores he ruthlessly laid bare
        • The skin-flint: loved the reflecting surface of a dollar, counted wild ducks as trespassers, would drain the pond for mud
        • True naming: let lakes be named from fishes, fowl, flowers, or some wild man or child whose history is woven with them
        • Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth: farmers are interesting in proportion as they are poor
        • The model farm: house like a fungus in a muck-heap, stocked with men, manured with hearts and brains
      • White Pond and the Lakes of Light
        • White Pond, Walden's twin: same stony shore and hue; so alike you would say they must be connected underground
        • The sunken yellow-pine: hauled out wrong end up, its butt bearing marks of axe and woodpecker
        • The blue flag: grows thinly in pure water over stony bottom, visited by humming birds in June
        • Lakes of Light: too pure to have a market value; were they solid gems they would adorn emperors' heads
        • Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her: she flourishes most alone, far from towns; "Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth."
  • Chapter 10 - Baker Farm
    • Forest Shrines and Wild Beauty
      • Pine groves: stand like temples or full-rigged fleets, so soft and green that Druids would forsake their oaks.
      • Swamp altars: usnea lichen festoons spruce; toadstools are round tables of swamp gods; fungi adorn stumps like butterflies.
      • Tree shrines: instead of scholars, he visits rare black-birch, yellow-birch, beech, hornbeam, false elm, pine, hemlock.
      • Beech grove: one small grove remains; its neat lichen-painted bole and silver grain make it worth splitting.
    • Rainbow and Halo
      • Rainbow arch: standing within its abutment, he lived briefly like a dolphin in a lake of rainbow light.
      • Haloed shadow: walking the railroad causeway, he wondered at the halo around his shadow and fancied himself elect.
      • Cellini's sign: a resplendent light over his shadow after a vision seemed supernatural, basis enough for superstition.
      • Being regarded: are they not distinguished who are conscious that they are regarded at all?
    • John Field's Hard Bargain
      • Honest but shiftless: John Field works hard “bogging” for a neighbor at ten dollars an acre plus land and manure.
      • Poor bargain: his broad-faced son works cheerfully beside him, not knowing how poor the bargain is.
      • Derivative wants: he begins with tea, coffee, butter, milk, and beef, then must work hard to pay for them.
      • Cyclical waste: working hard makes him eat hard to repair his system; he is discontented and wastes life.
      • Squalid hospitality: leaking roof, broken well, irrecoverable bucket; the water is gruel with motes.
      • Inherited poverty: with horizon all his own, he remains poor, not rising nor his posterity, until bog-trotting feet get talaria.
    • Counsel of Simple Living
      • Costly rent: Thoreau's tight clean house costs less than the annual rent of Field's ruin; he could build a palace in months.
      • Few wants: no tea, coffee, butter, milk, or fresh meat means little work and little food expense.
      • Light dress: light shoes and thin clothing cost half of thick boots and stout clothes worn out by bogging.
      • Fishing as recreation: in an hour or two he can catch fish for two days or earn a week's support.
      • True America: liberty to live without these things, not compelled to sustain slavery and war their use brings.
      • No arithmetic: Field and wife wonder if they have capital or arithmetic to begin; they sail by dead reckoning.
    • The Good Genius's Call
      • Good Genius: go fish and hunt far and wide, rest by brooks, rise free from care before dawn, seek adventures.
      • No larger fields: no worthier games than here; grow wild according to nature, like sedges never becoming English hay.
      • Living as sport: let not getting a living be thy trade but thy sport; enjoy the land, but own it not.
      • Enterprise and faith: men stay serfs, buying and selling, through want of enterprise and faith.
      • Return from afar: come home from adventures, perils, discoveries daily, with new experience and character.
      • Luck changes seats: John Field catches few fins while Thoreau catches a fair string; changing seats changes luck.
  • Chapter 11 - Higher Laws
    • The Two Instincts
      • Dual nature: an instinct toward a higher, spiritual life, and another toward a primitive, savage one — he reveres both
      • Savage delight: glimpsing a woodchuck cross his path, he felt a thrill of wildness and longed to devour it raw
      • Wildness loved: he loves the wild not less than the good, and likes sometimes to spend his day as animals do
      • Practitioners see more: hunters and woodsmen, part of Nature themselves, observe her better than philosophers who approach with expectation
    • Hunting and Fishing as Initiation
      • Boy as hunter: nearly every New England boy carried a fowling piece by fourteen; it was one of the best parts of his education
      • Advice to mothers: make them hunters, for the boy who never fired a gun is no more humane, only neglected
      • Outgrowing the gun: the youth with seeds of better life distinguishes his proper objects and leaves gun and pole behind
      • Scarcity, not humanity: hunting fades because game grows scarce, not because men grew kinder
      • Faint intimation: he cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect, and reads that as the first streaks of morning
    • The Uncleanness of Flesh
      • Practical objection: animal food is unclean — it demands butcher, scullion, cook, and a tidy house to hide the mess
      • Not essentially feeding: having caught, cleaned, and eaten his fish, they seemed not to have fed him at all
      • Repugnance is instinct: the aversion to animal food is not the effect of experience but a native instinct
      • Butterfly and larva: insects in their perfect state eat less than larvae; the gross feeder is a man in the larva state
      • Destiny of the race: humanity will leave off eating animals as surely as savages left off eating one another
    • Temperance and Intoxication
      • Water alone: water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor
      • Infinite degrees: there are infinite degrees of drunkenness — even music may intoxicate
      • Coarse labor coarsens: long coarse labors compelled him to eat and drink coarsely too
      • Appetite, not food: it is neither quality nor quantity but devotion to sensual savors that defiles a man
      • Hunter and lady even: mud-turtles and calf's-foot jelly are the same appetite at different tables
    • Purity and the Animal Self
      • All sensuality is one: eating, drinking, cohabiting, sleeping sensually are one appetite in many forms
      • Reptile in us: an animal nature awakens as the higher slumbers; it can be withdrawn from, never changed
      • Chastity is flowering: chastity is the flowering of man; genius, heroism, and holiness are fruits that follow
      • Continent energy: generative energy dissipates when loose, but invigorates and inspires when continent
      • Exertion over sloth: from exertion come wisdom and purity; the unclean person is universally a slothful one
    • The Body as Temple
      • Self-sculpture: every man builds a temple called his body; flesh and bones are the sculptor's own material
      • Character in features: nobleness refines a man's features, while meanness and sensuality imbrute them
      • John Farmer's flute: after bathing, a flute's notes suggest work for faculties slumbering in him
      • New austerity: the only way out is to practise austerity, let mind descend into the body and redeem it
      • Increasing respect: the redeemed life ends in treating oneself with ever greater respect
  • Chapter 12 - Brute Neighbors
    • Meditation, Wild Neighbors, and War (Chapter 12 - Brute Neighbors · I)
      • Hermit and Poet at the Pond
        • Fishing as social exercise: catching the dinner is as much a social act as eating it
        • The poet's true industry: fishing is the only trade he has ever learned
        • Digging bait: the sport nearly equals catching fish when the appetite is not too keen
        • Bait economics: the increase of fair worms is nearly as the squares of the distances
      • The Interrupted Meditation
        • The hermit's dilemma: shall I go to heaven or a-fishing?
        • Vanishing thought: his thoughts have left no track, and he cannot find the path again
        • One opportunity: "There never is but one opportunity of a kind"
        • Whistling for thoughts: if it would do any good, he would whistle them back
      • Wild Neighbors at the Door
        • Native mouse: a wild kind not found in the village, tame enough to nibble cheese from his hand
        • Nest beneath the floor: it came out at lunchtime for crumbs before the second floor was laid
        • Phoebe and robin: one built in the shed, the other in a pine against the house for protection
      • Partridge Brood and Its Defense
        • Hen of the woods: the shy partridge leads her brood past his windows, clucking like a hen
        • Mimicry: chicks so exactly resemble dried leaves that travellers tread among them unknowing
        • Precocious stillness: held in the open hand, they squat without fear or trembling
        • Eyes like a limpid well: adult yet innocent, a wisdom clarified by experience, coeval with the sky
        • Shooting the parent: leaves the innocents prey to prowling beasts or mingling with decaying leaves
      • The Secretive Wood Dwellers
        • Otter: grows four feet long, big as a small boy, perhaps without any human glimpsing him
        • Raccoon: he saw them in the woods behind his house, still heard their whinnering at night
        • Woodcock: lures him from her brood by pretending broken wings and legs
        • Sitting still: all the wood's inhabitants exhibit themselves by turns to the patient watcher
      • The Ant War
        • Two races: red republicans on one hand, black imperialists on the other
        • Not a duellum but a bellum: the chips are covered with combatants, the ground strewn with dead
        • Silent resolution: no noise at all, yet human soldiers never fought so resolutely
        • The locked pair: the red gnaws a feeler's root while the black dashes and dismembers
        • Battle-cry: conquer or die; neither manifested the least disposition to retreat
        • The lone red ant: perhaps an Achilles, nourishing wrath apart, come to avenge his Patroclus
    • Ant Wars and Wild Cunning (Chapter 12 - Brute Neighbors · II)
      • The Ant Battle as Epic Combat
        • Moral equivalence: watching ants fight excites him as if they had been men
        • Diminishing difference: the more you think of it, the less the difference
        • Scale of carnage: for numbers engaged and slaughter, it rivals Austerlitz or Dresden
        • Concord Fight replayed: every ant a Buttrick, no hireling, all fighting for a principle
      • Under the Tumbler: The Duel's Aftermath
        • Specimen jar: he carries the chip indoors and sets it under a tumbler on the windowsill
        • Mutual ruin: the red gnaws a leg while his own breast is torn open, vitals exposed
        • Impenetrable armor: the black warrior's breastplate is too thick for the red to pierce
        • Ghastly trophies: the victor severs both heads and wears them like saddlebow trophies
        • Unknown outcome: he never learns who won or why they fought, yet feels harrowed all day
      • Ant Wars in the Annals
        • Recorded battles: Kirby and Spence note ant wars long celebrated and dated, Huber the sole modern witness
        • Æneas Sylvius: a great-and-small species battle fought in the pontificate of Eugenius IV
        • Olaus Magnus: the small ants victorious, burying their own dead and leaving giants to the birds
        • Thoreau's dating: his battle fell in the Presidency of Polk, five years before Webster's Fugitive-Slave Bill
      • Cats Gone Wild
        • Native wildness: even a rug-reared cat seems more at home in the woods than the regular inhabitants
        • Fierce family: meeting a wild cat with kittens, all backs up and spitting at him
        • The winged cat: Gilian Baker's gray cat grew flat strips of fur in winter and shed them in spring
        • Poet's cat: why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse?
      • The Loon and the Man
        • Rivalry: a man against a loon, played on the smooth surface of the pond
        • Cunning manoeuvres: the loon resurfaces where least expected, always leading to open water
        • Underwater domain: he swims faster beneath the surface and can reach the pond's deepest part
        • Betrayed by his laugh: the loud demoniac laugh gives him away, as does his white breast
        • Answered prayer: after his wild howl a wind rises and misty rain falls, as if his god were angry
      • Ducks Holding the Middle
        • Cunning tacks: ducks veer and hold the pond's middle, far from the sportsman's reach
        • Aerial survey: rising, they circle high enough to see other ponds and the river
        • Shared motive: perhaps they love Walden's water for the same reason Thoreau does
  • Chapter 13 - House-Warming
    • Autumn Harvest, Hearth, and Hospitality (Chapter 13 - House-Warming · I)
      • Wild Harvest and Autumn Signs
        • Grapes: gathered more for beauty and fragrance than for food.
        • Cranberries: admired as waxen gems, not raked and sold by bushel and dollar.
        • Chestnuts: laid up half a bushel, sometimes stealing nuts the squirrels and jays had chosen sound.
        • Ground-nut: forgotten aboriginal tuber, a faint promise that wild Nature might feed her own children.
        • Autumn gallery: maples and trees emerged week by week, admiring themselves in the lake's mirror.
        • Wasps and sun: thousands wintered in his lodge; he warmed himself on Walden's sunlit shore before artificial fire.
      • Building the Chimney and Fireplace
        • Masonry studied: cleaning second-hand bricks taught him the qualities of bricks and trowels.
        • Old mortar: sayings about its hardening grow firmer with age, hard to clean from old wiseacres.
        • Babylon: villages built of second-hand bricks from ruins, with cement older and probably harder.
        • Fireplace: the most vital part of the house; he chose fireplace bricks and used pond stones and sand.
        • Chimney: an independent structure rising through the house to heaven, sometimes standing after the house burns.
        • Slow building: though it rose slowly, the work was calculated to endure; it served as his pillow at night.
      • The Single Room Made Warm
        • First inhabiting: he began to inhabit the house when it gave warmth as well as shelter.
        • Unplastered charm: rough boards, bark-on rafters, and flickering shadows pleased him more than plaster.
        • Poet boarder: a poet stayed a fortnight, sharing cooking; the small house was put to room.
        • Single apartment: kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room in one; all house's attractions concentrated.
        • Cato's cellar: a firkin of potatoes, weeviled peas, rice, molasses, and meal made modest provision.
        • Soot and fire: he poked fire with more right and satisfaction once soot formed on his chimney.
      • Dream of the Open One-Room Hall
        • Golden-age house: vast, rude, primitive hall of enduring materials, without gingerbread work.
        • Open interior: bare rafters, king and queen posts, cavernous roof; inhabitants may live at hearth, window, or aloft.
        • No ceremony: entering the outer door ends ceremony; traveler can wash, eat, converse, and sleep.
        • Visible necessities: barrel, ladder, cupboard, boiling pot, fire, and oven; utensils are chief ornaments.
        • Modern hospitality: host builds a separate hearth in an alley; hospitality becomes art of keeping guests distant.
        • Parlor remoteness: language loses nerve; dinner is only a parable, parlor far from kitchen and workshop.
      • Plastering Before Winter
        • Delayed plaster: he plastered only in freezing weather, bringing cleaner sand by boat from the opposite shore.
        • Lathing: pleased to send each nail home with one hammer blow; aimed to transfer plaster neatly and rapidly.
        • Plasterer's mishap: a conceited adviser got a trowelful in his bosom, teaching plasterer's casualties.
        • Thirsty bricks: bricks drank the plaster's moisture; many pails of water were needed to christen a new hearth.
        • Lime: he had burned river shells for experiment, so knew his material's origin; local limestone was available.
        • Freezing pond: shallow coves skimmed over days or weeks before the general freezing.
    • Winter Fire and the Warm Hearth (Chapter 13 - House-Warming · II)
      • The First Ice as a Lens
        • First ice: hard, dark, transparent — the best chance to study the shallow bottom
        • Lying on thin ice: like a skater insect reading the bottom as a picture behind glass
        • Bubbles beneath: thirty or forty per square inch, each reflecting your face
        • Within the ice: sharp cones or bead-like spheres stacked one above another
        • Bubbles as burning glasses: each melts and rots the ice below, helping it crack and whoop
      • Winter Sets In
        • The geese: night after night lumbering in with clangor, some bound for Mexico
        • Freeze dates: Walden froze Dec 22, 1845; shallower ponds and the river ten days sooner
        • Retreat: with snow on Nov 25, he withdraws into his shell, keeping fire within and without
      • The Wood-Pile and Fuel
        • Gathering dead wood: hauling forest waste and old fence; sacrificing it to Vulcan, not Terminus
        • Drift-wood raft: pitch-pine logs, waterlogged yet burning hot and long, the pitch confined like a lamp
        • Wood's value: more permanent than gold — no man walks past a pile of wood
        • The axe: an old unclaimed axe rehung with hickory; "if it was dull, it was at least hung true"
        • Fat pine roots: prospecting old pine hillsides, mining marrowy yellow wood deep in the earth
      • Fire as Companion
        • The fire: left alive three or four hours, a cheerful and trustworthy housekeeper
        • The face in the fire: the laborer purifies his thoughts of the day's dross
        • A near mishap: a spark burned his bed as big as his hand; the sunny low roof lets fire safely go out
        • The stove's loss: it concealed the flame, making cooking a chemic rather than poetic process
      • Going a Step Beyond Instinct
        • Moles in the cellar: nesting in hair and paper, nibbling potatoes — wild things love comfort too
        • Animal vs man: the animal warms a bed; man boxes and warms air, keeping summer in winter
        • Time saved: fire, house, windows, and lamp free hours for the fine arts
        • Cold Fridays: a little colder Friday would cut the thread of human existence
  • Chapter 14 - Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors
    • Winter Solitude and Vanished Neighbors (Chapter 14 - Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors · I)
      • Winter Solitude and Self-Made Paths
        • Merry snow-storms: Thoreau spends cheerful evenings by his fire while snow whirls and even the owl is hushed.
        • Scarce company: for weeks his walks meet only woodcutters sledding logs to the village.
        • Nature as accomplice: wind lodges oak leaves in his footprints, which absorb sun and melt snow, leaving a dark guiding line.
      • Conjuring Human Society
        • Conjured neighbors: lacking company, he summons the former occupants of the woods to walk with him.
        • Recent memory: within townsmen's lifetimes the road laughed with gossip, and gardens and dwellings dotted the woods.
        • Wilder road: pines once scraped a chaise on both sides; women and children feared the walk to Lincoln.
        • Buried foundation: the road then crossed a maple swamp on logs whose remnants underlie the present highway.
      • Cato, Zilpha, and Brister
        • Cato Ingraham: a slave given a walnut patch in Walden Woods; his cellar hole survives, hidden by pines and filled with sumach and goldenrod.
        • Zilpha: spun linen and sang shrilly; in 1812 paroled English soldiers burned her house with her cat, dog, and hens.
        • Brister Freeman: "a handy Negro" who planted the apple trees still growing wild; his epitaph styles him "Sippio Brister."
        • Fenda: his hospitable, fortune-telling wife, remembered as "blacker than any of the children of night."
      • Breed's Location and the Election-Night Fire
        • New-England Rum: at Breed's location the demon arrives as friend or hired man, then robs and murders the whole family.
        • Tavern memory: dubious tradition places a tavern here, its well refreshing traveller and steed where men traded news.
        • Election-night fire: mischievous boys burned Breed's hut; Thoreau, sunk in Gondibert, leaped up and ran with the engines.
        • Idealists' error: the crowd named every other building until heat over the wall proved they had arrived.
        • Cooled ardor: the fire's nearness quenched their zeal; judging it worthless and far gone, they let it burn.
        • The heir: next night Thoreau found the son lying at the cellar wall, groping for the well-sweep hook that hung a family's history.
      • Wyman the Potter and Hugh Quoil
        • Wyman the potter: squatted deepest in the woods, made earthenware, and was too poor for the sheriff to tax beyond "attaching a chip."
        • Fictile art: a customer's inquiry taught Thoreau that pots are not grown like gourds nor handed down unbroken from Scripture.
        • Hugh Quoil: the last inhabitant before him — a ditcher, rumored Waterloo soldier; Napoleon went to St. Helena, Quoil to Walden Woods.
        • Tragic end: trembling delirium, a great coat in midsummer, a carmine face; he died in the road at Brister's Hill.
        • Unlucky castle: clothes curled as if themselves, a broken pipe, soiled cards, a silent black chicken, a garden never hoed.
        • Vanishing traces: only a dent in the earth, cellar stones, berries and sumachs, a pine or birch where hearth and door-stone stood.
    • Vanished Village and Winter Companions (Chapter 14 - Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors · II)
      • Vestiges of a Vanished Village
        • Covered wells: sealing a spring is a sorrowful act, coincident with wells of tears
        • Cellar dents: like deserted fox burrows, all that remains where human life once stirred
        • Philosophy's residue: all he learns of their debates is that “Cato and Brister pulled wool”
        • The lilac: planted by children's hands, it alone survives, blossoming as fair and sweet
      • Why the Hamlet Failed
        • Unimproved privileges: Walden's deep water and Brister's Spring only diluted their glass
        • A thirsty race: universally so; they drank long draughts but built nothing lasting
        • Lost industries: basket, broom, pottery, corn-parching might have made the wilderness blossom
        • Sterile soil: proved at least a guard against lowland degeneracy
        • Nature's retry: he is the first settler; he refuses to build on ruins, soil blanched and accursed
      • Solitude in Deep Snow
        • Seldom a visitor: no wanderer for a week or fortnight; snug as a meadow mouse
        • The Great Snow: families buried, found only by the chimney's breath in the drift
        • Winter routine: same steps, same length, divider-precision—yet filled with heaven's own blue
      • Winter Walks and the Owl
        • Appointments with trees: tramps eight or ten miles through deepest snow to greet beech and pine
        • The barred owl: half-shut eyes, nodding like a cat, keeping a peninsular relation to the watcher
        • Silent flight: guided by delicate sense of pine boughs rather than sight
      • Winter Visitors
        • The woodchopper: leaves his whittlings on the hearth and the odor of his pipe
        • The farmer: a “man on his farm,” as ready to extract a moral as haul manure
        • The poet: nothing deters him; actuated by pure love, his business calls at all hours
        • The philosopher: God's peddler, the most faith of any alive, friend of human progress
        • Boisterous mirth: the small house rings with laughter and sober talk; Broadway is deserted by comparison
      • The Guest Who Never Comes
        • Expected Visitor: he sometimes expects the Visitor who never comes
        • Vishnu Purana's rule: wait at eventide as long as milking a cow—he waited for a whole herd
  • Chapter 15 - Winter Animals
    • Frozen Ponds and Winter Landscape
      • Frozen ponds: ice creates shorter routes and strange new views of familiar landscape.
      • Flint's Pond: crossing snow-covered ice feels unexpectedly wide, like Baffin's Bay.
      • Distant fishermen: over the ice they seem sealers, Esquimaux, or fabulous giants and pygmies.
      • Walden as yard: while villagers are confined to streets, Thoreau walks and skates freely.
      • Moose-yard: ice bordered by snow-laden oaks and pines becomes a vast trodden space.
    • Night Sounds and Wild Discord
      • Hooting owl: its forlorn, melodious note is the lingua vernacula of Walden Wood.
      • Goose and cat-owl: a honking goose is answered by a harsh cat-owl, a thrilling discord.
      • Discord as concord: a discriminating ear finds elements of concord within the wild discord.
      • Whooping ice: the pond seems restless in its bed, troubled by bad dreams.
      • Frost cracks: the ground splits a quarter-mile long as if a team struck the door.
    • Foxes, Hounds, and the Hunt
      • Foxes by moonlight: they bark raggedly like forest dogs, rudimental men awaiting transformation.
      • Hounds' instinct: packs range the woods, yelping, while hunting horns prove man follows.
      • Fox tactics: circling old haunts, running walls, and crossing water to lose the scent.
      • Hunter's story: a fox sits listening on a rock; compassion falters, and the hunter shoots.
      • Silenced hounds: at the dead fox the pack stops hounding and circles in sober silence.
      • Old records: ledgers credit fox, wild-cat, and deer skins; hunters were once a merry crew.
    • Birds and Squirrels at the Corn
      • Sweet-corn bait: half a bushel on the snow draws rabbits, squirrels, jays, and chickadees.
      • Red squirrel: it zigzags by fits and starts, never walks, and seems to perform for spectators.
      • Squirrel's feast: it selects ears, nibbles daintily, drops cobs, then drags one to the woods.
      • Jays: they arrive as discordant, sneaking thieves, choke on kernels, and crack them by blows.
      • Chickadees: they pick crumbs and hammer seeds, tame enough to light on his armful of wood.
      • Familiarity: a squirrel steps on his shoe; a sparrow on his shoulder outranks an epaulet.
    • Partridges, Rabbits, and Small Natives
      • Partridges: brave winter birds burst away on whirring wings and feed on wild apple buds.
      • Snow shelters: partridges are often covered by drifts and may plunge into soft snow for days.
      • Rabbits: hares live under his house, nibble potato parings, and blend into the ground.
      • Hare's spring: a trembling, bony creature leaps away with elastic grace, asserting Nature's vigor.
      • Native resilience: partridge and rabbit are ancient, ground-hued; if woods are cut, sprouts shelter them.
      • Mice and pines: mice girdle pitch-pines, which survive a summer but die after another winter.
  • Chapter 16 - The Pond in Winter
    • Winter Ice, Deep Water, and Nature's Laws (Chapter 16 - The Pond in Winter · I)
      • The Answered Morning
        • Nature answers nothing: she puts no question and answers none that mortals ask
        • She has taken her resolution: long ago, without waiting on our doubts
        • Snow and young pines: the slope of the hill seemed to say Forward!
        • The pond's dormancy: it closes its eyelids and sleeps like the marmots three months or more
        • A window underfoot: cutting through snow and ice, kneeling to drink, I look into the quiet parlor of the fishes
        • Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads: serenity reigns in the waveless depths
      • The Wild Fishermen
        • Fishing through a snowy field: men let down fine lines for pickerel and perch
        • Wild men: instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities than their townsmen
        • Stitching towns together: their goings and comings join places that would else be ripped apart
        • Unbookish natural lore: they never consulted books, and can tell much less than they have done
        • Life deeper in Nature than study: the naturalist raises moss with a knife; the fisherman lays open logs with an axe
        • The chain of being: perch swallows grub, pickerel swallows perch, fisherman swallows pickerel
      • The Pickerel of Walden
        • Foreign as Arabia: caught here, yet always surprising, so alien to streets and even woods
        • Transcendent beauty: colors like flowers and precious stones, unlike cod or haddock
        • Animalized crystals of the water: the pearls and nuclei of Walden itself
        • Waldenses: they are Walden all over, small Waldens in the animal kingdom
        • Swimming beneath traffic: this gold and emerald fish moves far below the rattling teams and tinkling sleighs
        • Never seen in a market: it would be the cynosure of all eyes there
      • Sounding the Bottomless Pond
        • Bottomlessness is believed, not measured: men will long believe in it without taking the trouble to sound
        • Two Bottomless Ponds in one walk: some thought Walden reached through to the other side of the globe
        • The fifty-six and the rope: villagers fathomed their truly immeasurable capacity for marvellousness
        • The actual depth: one hundred and two feet, plus five risen, making one hundred and seven
        • A deep pond made for a symbol: I am thankful this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol
        • While men believe in the infinite: some ponds will be thought bottomless
      • The Shape of the Bottom
        • Water levels all inequalities: the deepest part is more level than almost any plowed field
        • Conformity to the shores: bottom and hills and promontories mirror each other perfectly
        • Cape becomes bar, valley deep water: the sunken landscape repeats the visible one
        • The coincidence: lines of greatest length and breadth intersect at the point of greatest depth
        • Bars across the coves: each bay tends to become an independent basin, like every harbor's bar
        • White Pond guessed right: from outlines alone I marked the deepest point within a hundred feet
      • Imagination and the Laws of Nature
        • Imagination outruns Nature: give it the least license, it dives deeper and soars higher
        • Shallow ponds would react on minds: a pond's depth is a fact about men as much as water
        • One fact would suffice: knowing all laws, a single phenomenon would infer all results
        • Our ignorance vitiates the result: not Nature's confusion, but our missing essential elements
    • The Pond as Character and Cosmopolis (Chapter 16 - The Pond in Winter · II)
      • Character as a Pond
        • Law of average: our detected laws are mere points of view; truer harmony arises from undetected concurring laws
        • Two diameters: the rule guiding us toward sun and heart also measures a man's character
        • Shore trend: from a man's shores and adjacent circumstances we infer his concealed bottom
        • Harbor bars: each inclination land-locks a thought; surfacing, it becomes an individual lake
      • Sounding Walden's Waters
        • No inlet: no visible inlet or outlet, only rain, snow, and evaporation
        • Leach hole: ice-men thought thinner ice marked an inlet; a small cavity under ten feet of water
        • Verification: colored powder and a strainer might prove a subterranean connection to the meadow
      • The Undulating Ice
        • Ice undulates: a sixteen-inch sheet waved like water under a slight wind
        • Level useless: leveling on ice, the greatest fluctuation measured three-quarters of an inch
        • Micro to macro: delicate instruments might detect an undulation in the earth's crust
      • The Great Ice Harvest
        • Prudent landlord: cuts January ice to cool July's drink — pathetically wise foresight
        • Hundred men: Irishmen with Yankee overseers swooped down to reap the pond
        • Azure stack: cakes piled like an obelisk, hay tucked between the layers
        • Wasted yield: the ice never reached market; the pond recovered it by September 1848
      • Color and Purity
        • Green to blue: Walden ice is green near at hand, beautifully blue at a distance
        • Transparency: the most transparent ice is the bluest
        • Ice and water: a bucket of water turns putrid; frozen, it stays sweet forever
      • The Cosmopolitan Well
        • One well: sweltering inhabitants of Charleston, Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta drink at his well
        • Bhagvat Geeta: he bathes his intellect in that cosmogonal philosophy each morning
        • Brahmin and Walden: the priest's servant and he draw from the same well; the waters mingle
        • Far voyage: Walden water wafts past Atlantis and the Hesperides to ports Alexander only heard of
  • Chapter 17 - Spring
    • Thaw, Leaf, and Living Earth (Chapter 17 - Spring · I)
      • Walden's Slow Awakening
        • Deep water, no stream: Walden thaws a week or more later than Flint's Pond and Fair-Haven.
        • Steady temperature: a mid-pond thermometer reads freezing on March 6, indifferent to transient cold snaps.
        • Reflected heat: shallow ponds break up sooner because sunlight passes through ice and rebounds from the bottom.
        • Ice-out record: Walden opened April 1, 1845; March 25, 1846; April 8, 1847; March 23, 1853.
      • The Ice and Its Voice
        • Honeycombing: sun penetrates a foot of ice, warming the water beneath until air cells hollow it out.
        • Ice has grain: like wood, its cells align at right angles to what was once the water surface.
        • Shore first: rocks and logs near the surface thin the ice above them by reflected heat.
        • Thundering pond: cracking ice booms like a gong from sunrise, rests at noon, fires an evening gun.
        • Sensitive to weather: the pond answers atmospheric change as faithfully as mercury in a tube.
      • Small Epitome of the Year
        • Day mirrors year: night is winter, morning and evening are spring and fall, noon is summer.
        • Pond in miniature: the phenomena of the year take place daily, on a small scale, in a pond.
        • Spring's arrivals: bluebird, song-sparrow, red-wing, squirrel, and woodchuck announce the turning season.
        • Spirited away: honeycombed ice vanishes overnight in warm rain and fog, leaving no trace.
      • The Old Man and the Ice
        • A veteran observer: an old naturalist who seemed to hold no secrets from Nature.
        • Firm field of ice: on a warm day he found Fair-Haven unexpectedly covered though the river ran clear.
        • A distant roar: he mistook the swelling sound for an immense flock of fowl settling down.
        • The ice drifts: the whole sheet had started, grating and heaving its wrecks up the island shore.
      • Sand Foliage on the Bank
        • Sand flows like lava: when frost leaves the railroad cut, sand streams down the slopes in rich colors.
        • Hybrid law: the streams obey halfway the law of currents, halfway the law of vegetation.
        • Foliage forms: heaps that resemble sappy leaves, vines, lichens, coral, leopards' paws.
        • Arteries form: a silvery thread cuts its own meandering channel — such are the sources of rivers.
        • Creation of an hour: a whole bank lies covered with luxuriant foliage, the produce of one spring day.
      • The Leaf as Nature's Patent
        • Artist's laboratory: the sand foliage lets him stand where the world's Maker is still at work.
        • Prototype of the leaf: earth labors with the leaf inwardly before expressing it outwardly.
        • Body as thawing clay: fingers, nose, chin, cheeks are drops congealed from a flowing mass.
        • Everything a leaf: feathers and wings are drier leaves; trees, rivers, cities repeat the form.
        • Nothing inorganic: Earth in swaddling clothes, stretching baby fingers; Spring precedes green spring.
    • Thaw, Rebirth, and Universal Innocence (Chapter 17 - Spring · II)
      • The Living Earth
        • Not fossil but living: the earth is living poetry, leaves on a tree, not dead strata for geologists.
        • Central life: beside the earth's great central life, all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.
        • Thaw over Thor: gentle persuasion melts; the hammer only breaks in pieces.
        • Plastic world: not only the earth but its institutions are clay in the potter's hands.
      • Winter's Withered Beauty
        • Late-ripening beauty: withered life-everlasting, goldenrods, and pinweeds outshine their summer selves.
        • Unreaped granaries: strong-stemmed weeds entertain the earliest birds — decent weeds on widowed Nature.
        • Wool-grass: its arching sheaf-like top recalls summer; an antique style older than Greek or Egyptian.
        • Winter as lover: the king we call a rude tyrant gently adorns the tresses of Summer.
      • The Great Thaw
        • Red squirrels: chuckling beneath the floorboards, deaf to argument, defying humanity to stop their mad pranks.
        • First sparrow: the year begins with younger hope; birdsong falls like the last tinkling flakes of winter.
        • Grass flames up: green fire from the earth's inward heat — the symbol of perpetual youth streaming into summer.
        • Human life's root: our life dies down to its root and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.
        • Walden dead and alive again: ice cracks off, water sparkles with glee, the pond speaks the joy of its fishes.
        • Instantaneous crisis: winter to spring arrives at once — an influx of light, a robin, geese honking home.
      • Spring as Moral Renewal
        • Cosmos from Chaos: spring's coming is the creation of the world and the realization of the Golden Age.
        • One gentle rain: makes the grass many shades greener; so prospects brighten on an influx of better thoughts.
        • Live in the present: take every accident like grass taking dew, instead of atoning for past neglect.
        • Universal pardon: on a spring morning all men's sins are forgiven; such a day is a truce to vice.
        • Recovered innocence: through our own we discern our neighbor's, seeing fresh shoots break from gnarled rind.
        • Refused pardon: jailer, judge, and preacher keep their doors shut, ignoring the hint God gives them.
      • The Hawk and the Tonic of Wildness
        • Ethereal hawk: tumbling alone in the air, needing only morning and ether; it makes all earth lonely beneath it.
        • Proof of immortality: so pure a first-spring light would wake the dead — where then was death's sting?
        • Tonic of wildness: village life would stagnate without unexplored forests, marshes, and unfathomed land and sea.
        • Universal innocence: Nature affords myriads to be sacrificed; poison is not poisonous, no wound fatal.
        • Compassion untenable: it must be expeditious; its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped.
      • Summer Arrives, Walden Left
        • Trees in May: oaks and maples bursting among the pines brighten the landscape like sun breaking through mist.
        • New arrivals: loon, whippoorwill, thrasher, veery, and pewee return; the phoebe inspects the cabin for nesting.
        • Sulphur showers: pitch-pine pollen coats pond and stones, the golden dust of the season.
        • Departure: the first year completed, the second similar; he left Walden on September 6th, 1847.
  • Conclusion
    • Explore Thyself, Obey Inner Law (Conclusion · I)
      • The Wider World Within
        • Change of air: Doctors prescribe travel for the sick; yet here is not all the world.
        • Inward geography: The universe is wider than our views; the unexplored interior matters more than distant lands.
        • Noble game: Hunting giraffes or snipes is lesser sport than shooting one's self—directing sight inward.
        • Private sea: England, France, Spain front this private sea; no bark has ventured out of sight of land.
        • Inner Columbus: Be an explorer of new continents within, opening channels of thought, not trade.
        • Self-respect before patriotism: Those who sacrifice the greater to the less love the soil but not the spirit.
      • Obedience to Inner Law
        • Leaving Walden: He left for as good a reason as he went; he had several more lives to live.
        • Ruts of conformity: A week wore a path to the pond; mind paths become worn, dusty highways.
        • Before the mast: He chose the deck, not a cabin passage, to see moonlight amid mountains.
        • Higher laws: A saner man opposes sacred laws only by obeying yet more sacred laws of his being.
        • Mirabeau's error: Highway robbery to test resolution was idle; true test comes through obedience.
      • Dreams, Simplicity, Foundations
        • Confident advance: Move in the direction of your dreams and meet success unexpected in common hours.
        • Invisible boundary: Such advance passes an invisible boundary; old laws expand in your favor.
        • Simplify: As life simplifies, the universe's laws appear less complex; solitude and poverty lose sting.
        • Castles in air: Build them where they belong, then put the foundations under them.
      • Extravagant Expression
        • Unbounded speech: It is ridiculous to demand you speak so England and America can understand you.
        • Extravagance: Fear expression may not wander far enough beyond daily experience to fit truth.
        • Living undefined: In view of the possible, live laxly and undefined in front, outlines dim.
        • Common sense: The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, expressed by snoring.
        • Brain-rot: England tries to cure potato-rot; no one cures the wider, more fatal brain-rot.
        • Walden ice: Blue ice was pure; Cambridge white tasted of weeds—purity is not white mist.
      • The Different Drummer and Perfection
        • Different drummer: If a man does not keep pace, perhaps he hears a different drummer; let him step to it.
        • No forced maturity: It is not important to mature as soon as an apple tree or oak.
        • Vain reality: If the condition we were made for is not yet, do not be shipwrecked on substitutes.
        • Kouroo artist: He sought a perfect staff; in perfect work, time does not enter.
        • Perennial youth: Singleness of purpose endowed him with youth; Time kept out of his way.
    • Truth, Poverty, and Awakening (Conclusion · II)
      • The Artist of Kouroo
        • The Kouroo artist: perfecting a single staff, he makes a new world of full proportion
        • Dynasties fall, the work continues: cities and races vanish while he smooths and polishes
        • Time as illusion: when the staff is finished, only a scintillation of Brahma's brain has passed
        • Pure material, pure art: how could the result be anything but wonderful?
      • Truth Wears Well
        • Truth wears well: no face we can give a matter serves us at last like the truth
        • False position: we suppose a case, put ourselves in it, and live in two cases at once
        • Sane moments: we regard only the facts, the case that is
        • Say what you have to say: not what you ought; any truth is better than make-believe
        • Tom Hyde's tailors: knot your thread before the first stitch; a concrete truth outlives a companion's prayer
      • Meeting Life, Cultivating Poverty
        • Meet your life: however mean it is, live it; do not shun it or call it hard names
        • It is not so bad as you are: your life looks poorest when you are richest
        • Cultivate poverty: like a garden herb, like sage; the alms-house window catches the same setting sun
        • Turn the old: no need of new clothes or friends; things do not change, we change
        • Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts: superfluous wealth buys only superfluities
      • Independence of Mind
        • Thought is inalienable: in a garret corner like a spider, the world is as large with your thoughts
        • Tintinnabulum of contemporaries: fashion and gossip; a goose is a goose, dress it as you will
        • Come to your bearings: stand or sit thoughtfully while the restless Nineteenth Century goes by
        • No anxious development: subjecting yourself to many influences is all dissipation
        • Humility like darkness: reveals the heavenly lights
      • Solid Foundations, Sincere Work
        • Solid bottom: the bog has one, the boy says, but you are not halfway to it yet
        • Drive the nail home: not into lath and plastering; feel for the furring and clinch it faithfully
        • Every nail a rivet: your work carries on the machine of the universe
        • Rather than love, money, fame, give me truth: sincerity outranks every lesser good
        • Inhospitable board: rich food and ices without truth — he left hungry
        • The man in the hollow tree: his manners were truly regal; the king kept him waiting in the hall
      • Awakening and Resurrection
        • We know not where we are: few delve six feet down or leap as many up; we sleep half our time
        • Human insect: a greater Benefactor stands over us as we stand over the crawling insect
        • A tide behind every man: could float the British Empire like a chip if harbored in the mind
        • The buried egg: a winged life may gnaw out of society's well-seasoned furniture into perfect summer
        • Only that day dawns to which we are awake: the sun is but a morning star
• Core Conclusion and Practical Takeaways
  • The Core Conclusion
    • Wealth is subtraction: a man is rich in proportion to what he can afford to let alone
    • Cost equals life: the price of anything is the amount of life exchanged for it
    • Most lives are quiet desperation: men labor under a mistake, their better part ploughed into the soil
    • Live deliberately: front only the essential facts of life, lest dying you discover you never lived
    • Nature outlasts the observer: after all its ripples Walden has no permanent wrinkle; the change is in me
    • Awakening is the aim: moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep; only that day dawns to which we are awake
  • Daily Practices
    • Simplify, simplify: one meal instead of three, five dishes instead of a hundred, accounts on your thumbnail
    • Rise early and bathe: renew yourself completely each day; morning is when I am awake
    • Work lightly for a living: six weeks of hand labor a year frees whole winters for study
    • Keep possessions few: bed, table, desk, three chairs; let whatever you must drag be light
    • Read deliberately: classics in the original, in your most alert hours, as reservedly as they were written
    • Keep a broad margin: unclaimed space around every activity; do not sacrifice the present's bloom to work
  • Mindset Shifts
    • Own without owning: buy every farm in succession without a deed, letting the landscape radiate from you
    • Live free and uncommitted: being committed to a farm differs little from the county jail
    • Hear a different drummer: if a man does not keep pace, let him step to the music he hears
    • Rebuild reality: shams pass for soundest truths; settle through opinion until you strike hard bottom
    • Purify the appetite: all sensuality is one; chastity is the flowering of man, genius and holiness its fruit
    • Expect spring's pardon: on a spring morning all men's sins are forgiven; our life greens again from its root
  • Work, Truth, and Sincerity
    • Drive the nail home: feel for the furring and clinch it faithfully; every nail a rivet in the universe
    • Say what you have to say: not what you ought; any truth is better than make-believe
    • Prefer truth to love, money, fame: rich food and ices without truth still leave a man hungry
    • Build castles in the air: then put the foundations under them; advance confidently toward your dreams
    • Perfect the work and time vanishes: the Kouroo artist spent dynasties on a staff and made a new world
    • Be good rather than do good: let goodness be unconscious overflow, not philanthropy with kindness aforethought
  • Nature, Wildness, and the Awakened Life
    • Keep a tonic of wildness: village life would stagnate without unexplored forests, marshes, and unfathomed land
    • Cultivate poverty like a garden herb: the almshouse window catches the same setting sun
    • Look into a lake: it is earth's eye; the beholder measures the depth of his own nature
    • Solitude is companionable: a man thinking or working is always alone, and no more lonely than the loon
    • Heaven is under our feet: beneath winter ice, the quiet parlor of the fishes reigns in waveless serenity