Walden - Henry David Thoreau

Rating 9/10

My Summary:

A lovely book detailing my favorite place in the greater Boston area. Its important to spend solitary time thinking, so that you can pounce back into the world and seize what you want. Also, there is no greater satisfaction than to live on your own, building what you need. Though, its important to have a rich friend to bank roll your adventure…

Quotes:

Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man.

But no weather interfered fatally with my walks, or rather my going abroad, for I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines;

“Direct your eye right inward, and you’ll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be Expert in home-cosmography.”

When I meet a government which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.

They speak of moving society, but have no resting-place without it.