The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
resignation is confirmed
desperation. From the desperate city you go into the
desperate country, and have to console yourself with the
bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious
despair is concealed even under what are called the games
and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for
this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of
wisdom not to do desperate things.
-- Henry David Thoreau. Walden (1854) p.14
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.
-- Henry David Thoreau. Walden (1854) p. 76
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our
attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an
unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive
at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste
to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and
Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
-- Henry David Thoreau. Walden (1854) p. 43-44
No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted
without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true
to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion,
which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing
rain on their fields.
-- Henry David Thoreau. Walden, Chapter 1.
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our
attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an
unimproved end..
-- Henry David Thoreau. Walden (1854).