Thursday

CHAPTER 2 - "Where I Lived and What For"

He goes to Walden Pond because he wishes to live deliberately, to slow down the fast pace of modern life and actually enjoy it.  He claims that you can't learn anything from newspapers about live ("The Revolution will not be Televised")

Quotes:
"As long as possible live free and uncommitted.  It makes little difference whether you are committed to a farm or a county jail."

"Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.  Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.  Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering?"

"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."

"I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.  How could I have looked him in the face?"

"Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity."

"We do not ride on the railroads; it rides upon us."

"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?"

"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip."

"Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature."

"I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born."

Chapter 3 READING

Reading literature is the closest thing to live.

Reading great books requires training such training as athletes undergo.

Nothing truly can be translated.

"Most men have learned to read to serve paltry convenience, as they learned to ciper in order to keep accounts... but reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a higher sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury .. but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to."

"The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers."

"I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannont read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects."

"We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment."