My book starts with Thoreau's solutions to common struggles of life. We solve these struggles by focusing on the messages that Nature teaches about living in balance. By applying these lessons we are able to manage our lives, and find ways to simplify and enjoy what we have.

I wrote notes for many passages to clarify the relationship between Thoreau and Taoism. The links to those notes are beneath each passage.

1.
Let us spend one day deliberately as nature,
and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing
that falls on the rails.
Let us rise early and fast, or break fast,
gently and without perturbation;
let company come and company go,
let the bells ring
and the children cry,
determined to make a day of it.

Let us settle ourselves and work,
and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush
of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition,
and delusion and appearance,
that alluvion which cover the globe,
till we come to the hard bottom and rocks
which we can call reality,
and say:
This is.

The note for this passage

2.
This is the only way, we say;
but there are as many ways
as there can be drawn radii from one center.
All change is a miracle to contemplate;
but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward
that which most strongly and rightfully attracts me;
- not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less,
- not suppose a case, but take the case that is;
to travel the only path I can,
and that on which no power can resist me.

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is
that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

3.
If I wished a boy to know something
I would not send him to some professor,
to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope,
and never with his natural eye;
to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him,
while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar.
To discover new satellites to Neptune,
and not detect the motes in his eyes,
or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself.

Which would have advanced the most by the end of a month,
the boy who made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted,
or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute
and had received a penknife from his father?
Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?

I mean that they should not play life,
or study it merely,
but earnestly live it from beginning to end.
These pages are more particularly addressed to poor students.

The note for this passage

4.
With more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits,
all men would perhaps become students and observers.
It is time we had uncommon schools,
that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be young men and women.
It is time that villages were universities,
and their elder inhabitants the fellows of the universities,
with leisure to pursue liberal studies for the rest of their lives.

What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry,
or the most admirable routine of life,
compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?
No method or discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever alert.
Will you be a reader, a student,
or a seer?

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thought,
but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates,
a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

The note for this passage

27.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed,
and in such desperate enterprises?
If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music that he hears
however measured or far away.

It is not important that he should mature
as soon as an apple-tree or an oak.
Shall he turn his spring into summer?

Do not seek so anxiously to be developed,
to subject yourself to many influences
to be played on;
it is all dissipation.

Humility like darkness
reveals the heavenly lights.

The note for this passage

40.
Men frequently say to me, "I should think you would feel lonesome down there,
and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially."
I am tempted to reply to such:
This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space.
How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star,
the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments?
Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?

This seems to me not to be the most important question.
What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and make him solitary?
I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.

What do we want most to dwell near to?
Not to many men, surely, the depot, the post-office, the barroom, the meeting house,
but to the perennial source of our life,
as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction.

The note for this passage

41.
After a still winter night I awoke with the impression
that some question had been put to me:
what - how - when - where?

But there was dawning Nature,
in whom all creatures live,
looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face,
and no question on her lips.

Nature puts no questions and answers none which we mortals ask.
I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight.

56.
As I was bending my steps again to the pond,
my haste to catch pickerel
appeared for an instant trivial to me
who had been sent to school and college.

But as I ran down the hill toward the reddening west,
with the rainbow over my shoulder,
and some faint tinkling sounds borne to my ear
through the cleansed air,
my Good Genius seemed to say -
Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day -
farther and wider -
and rest by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving.

Remember thy creator in the days of thy youth.
Rise free from care before the dawn
and seek adventures.
Let the noon find thee by other lakes,
and the night overtake thee
everywhere at home.

The note for this passage

58.
I have been anxious to improve the nick of time,
and notch it on my stick too;
to stand on the meeting of two eternities,
the past and the future,
which is precisely the present moment;
to toe that line.

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.

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.

The note for this passage

68.
I learned this, at least, from my experiment;
that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,
and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined,
he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.

He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary;
new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves
around and within him;
or the old laws be expanded,
and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense,
and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.

In proportion as he simplifies his life,
the laws of the universe will appear less complex,
and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

If you have built castles in the air,
your work need not be lost;
that is where they should be.
Now put the foundations under them.

The note for this passage

Back to top

Home