With the daily destruction of the environment on a monumental scale, the writings of Henry David Thoreau, I would argue, are more important than ever. I first came across his writings in high school, when we were studying the Transcendental movement. Even more than Emerson, who seemed a little detached, Thoreau immediately embedded himself in my consciousness, both for his love of nature and his distrust of human institutions.

I came across a worn copy of The Selected Journals of Henry David Thoreau, Signet Classic edition, edited in 1980, at a library book sale. I will say, unlike his published writings, these entries can be repetitive and tedious – as anyone’s journal may be, as it simply was never meant for publication. However, there were still many great nuggets from this great thinker, and I have compiled my favorite below.

1839

  • July 25 – There is no remedy for love but to love more.

1841

  • January 24 – Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.
  • April 26 – The charm of the Indian to me is that he stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guests, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison, in which he finds himself oppressed and confined, not sheltered and protected… His muscles are never relaxed. It is rare that he overcomes the house, and learns to sit at home in it, and roof and floor and walls support themselves, as the sky and trees and earth.
  • September 1 – Let us know and conform only to the fashions of eternity.

1842

  • March 11 – I feel as if [I] could at any time resign my life and the responsibility of living into God’s hands, and become as innocent, free from care, as a plant or stone.

1845

  • The indecent haste and grossness with which our food is swallowed have cast a disgrace on the very act of eating itself.

1850

  • November 20 – It is a common saying among country people that if you eat much fried hasty putting it will make your hair curl. My experience, which was considerable, did not confirm this assertion.

1851

  • July 16 – In youth, before I lost any of my senses, I can remember that I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshment were sweet to me.
  • August 23 – It is narrow to be confined to woods and fields and grand aspects of Nature only. The greatest and wisest will still be related to men.
  • September 2 – We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. The body, the senses, must conspire with the mind. Expression is the act of the whole man, that our speech may be vascular. The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of every member. Often I feel that my head stands out too dry, when it should be immersed. A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart. The maturity of the mind, however, may perchance consist with a certain dryness.
  • November 16 – Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man and serves him directly.
  • December 17 – Improve every opportunity to express yourself in writing, as if it were your last.

1852

  • January 15 – Lord Somebody-or-other may have made himself comfortable, but the very style of his living makes it necessary that the great majority of his countrymen should be uncomfortable.
  • April 24 – It is impossible for me to be interested in what interests men generally. Their pursuits and interests seem to me frivolous.

1853

  • March 5 – How absurd that, though I probably stand as near to nature as any of them, and am by constitution as good an observer as most, yet a true account of my relation to nature should excite their ridicule only! If it had been the secretary of an association of which Plato or Aristotle was the president, I should not have hesitated to describe my studies at once and particularly.
  • October 26 – When, after feeling dissatisfied with my life, I aspire to something better, and more scrupulous, more reserved and continent, as if expecting somewhat, suddenly I find myself full of life as a nut of meat–am overflowing with a quiet, genial mirthfulness. I think to myself, I must attend to my diet; I must get up earlier and take a morning walk; I must have done with luxuries and devote myself to my muse. So I dam up my stream, and my waters gather to a head. I’m freighted with thought.
  • November 15 – A hard, insensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, course, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft.

1854

  • January 27 – The greatest complement has ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
  • February 18 – Your Congress halls have an ale-house odor – a place for stale jokes and vulgar wit. It compels me to think of my fellow-creatures as apes and baboons.
  • August 2 – I feel the necessity of deepening the stream of my life; I must cultivate privacy. It is very dissipating to be with people too much.
  • December 21 – What a grovelling appetite for profitless jest and amusement our countrymen have!

1855

  • October 23 – If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others.
  • November 18 – It is fouler and uglier to have too much than not to have enough.

1856

  • March 10 – Surely he who can see so large a portion of Earth’s surface thus darkened with the record of human thought and experience, and feel no desire to learn to read it, is without curiosity. He who cannot read is worse than death and blind, is yet but half alive, is still-born.
  • August 31 – Often, I would rather undertake to shoulder a barrel of pork and carry it a mile then take into my company a man. It would not be so heavy a weight upon my mind. I can put it down and only feel my back ache for it.
  • December 29 – We must go out and re-ally ourselves to Nature every day. We must make root, send out some little fibre at least, even every winter day. I am sensible that I am imbibing health when I open my mouth to the wind. Staying in the house and breeds a sort of insanity always. Every house is in this sense a hospital. A night and a forenoon is as much confinement to those wards as I can stand. I am aware that I recover some sanity which I had lost the instant that I come abroad.

1857

  • February 8 – Again and again I congratulate myself on my so-called poverty… In the society of many men, or in the midst of what is called success, I find my life of no account, and my spirits rapidly fall… But when I have only a rustling oak leaf, or the faint metallic cheep of a tree sparrow, for variety in my winter walk, my life becomes continent and sweet as the kernel of a nut.
  • April 26 – A great part of our troubles are literally domestic or originate in the house and from living indoors. I could write an essay to be entitled “Out of Doors” – undertake a crusade against houses. What a different thing Christianity preached to the house-bred and to a party who lived out of doors!
  • May 3 – I sympathize not today with those who go to church and newest close and sit quietly in straight-backed pews. I sympathize rather with the boy who has none to look after him, who borrows a boat and paddle and in common clothes sets out to explore these temporary vernal lakes.
  • August 10 – What, pray is true jewelry? The hardened tear of a diseased clam, murdered in its old age. Is that fair play? If not, it is no jewel.
  • October 7 – I do not know how to entertain one who can’t take long walks.

1858

  • May 6 – The thinker, he who is serene and self-possessed, is the brave, not the desperate soldier. He who can deal with his thoughts as material, building them into poems in which future generations will delight, he is the man of the greatest and rarest vigor, not sturdy diggers and lusty polygamists.
  • May 6 – Men talk of freedom! How many are free to think? free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice? Nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand are perfect slaves.
  • May 6 – There is no more Herculean task to think a thought about this life and then get it expressed.
  • August 9 – Newspapers, magazines, colleges, and all forms of government and religion express the superficial activity of a few, the mass either conforming or not attending.
  • October 18 – A village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheery prospects to keep off melancholy and superstition. Show me two villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the other a merely trivial and treeless waste, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most desperate and hardest drinkers.

1859

  • March 28 – As much as sportsmen go in pursuit of ducks, and gunners of musquash, and scholars of rare books, and travelers of adventure, and poets of ideas, and all men of money, I go in search of arrowheads when the proper season comes around again. So I help myself to live worthily, and loving my life as I should.
  • September 16 – Again and again I am surprised to observe what an interval there is, in what is called civilized life, between the shell and the inhabitant of the shell – what a disproportion there is between the life of man and his conveniences and luxuries.
  • September 22 – It would be fit that the tobacco plant should spring up on the house-site, aye on the grave, of almost every householder of Concorde. These vile weeds are sown by vile men.
  • October 15 – Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession for ever, for instruction and recreation…To attend chiefly to the desk or schoolhouse while we neglect the scenery in which it is placed is absurd.

1860

  • November 5 – I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected. Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to an extreme old age.
  • November 28 – Go to the English Government, which, of course, is representative of the people, and ask, What is the use of juniper berries? The answer is, To flavor gin with. This is the gross abuse of juniper berries, with which an enlightened government – if ever there shall be one – will have nothing to do.