Captain Neal is a modern day Thoreau.


I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least";
and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.
Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe— "That
government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for
it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no
higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and
drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it
comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more,
and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head.

* When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived
alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built
myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned
my living by the labor of my hands only.
o First lines

* The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
resignation is confirmed desperation.

* There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root.

* The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul
to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good
behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

* There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet
it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a
philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a
school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life
of simplicity, indepdendence, magnanimity, and trust.

* I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be
crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart,
with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion
train and breathe a malaria all the way. The very simplicity and nakedness
of man's life in the primitive ages imply this advantage, at least, that
they left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with
food and sleep, he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in
a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the
plains, or climbing the mountain-tops. But lo! men have become the tools of
their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry
is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a
housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on
earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an
improved method of agriculture. We have built for this world a family
mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the
expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the
effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that
higher state to be forgotten.


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

* All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and
emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps
pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the
clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake
and there is a dawn in me.

* The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a
million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a
hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I
have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in
the face? We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by
mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not
forsake us in our soundest sleep.

* I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of
man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able
to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few
objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very
atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To
affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is
tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of
his most elevated and critical hour.

* I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front
only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had
to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did
not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to
practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep
and suck out all the marrow of life, 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.

* Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to
count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten
toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your
affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a
million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In
the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and
storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a
man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make
his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed
who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be
necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other
things in proportion.

* Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying,
let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if
we are alive, let us go about our business. Time is but the stream I go
a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and
detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity
remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with
stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I
have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of
things.

* My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some
creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow
my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere
hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here
I will begin to mine.