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"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation
is confirmed desperation ... There is no play in them, for this comes after
work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things."
"But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too
late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however, ancient,
can be trusted without proof. ... Old deeds for old people, and new deeds
for new."
" 'But,' says one, 'you do not mean that the students should go to work with their
hands instead of their heads?' I do not mean that exactly, but mean
something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they
should not play life, or study it merely, while the community
supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from
beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once
trying the experiment of living?"
"I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer
in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up."
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential
facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not,
when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live
what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation,
unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all
the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put
to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to
drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it
proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it,
and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it
by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."
"I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because
our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that
is which appears to be."
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