1854 · Skopia

Showing 38 works across all media from 1854

Nonfiction · Philosophy

Walden

Henry David Thoreau

1854 · 802 pages

Two years in a cabin by a Massachusetts pond, and the permanent argument against a life spent earning. Thoreau writes about beans, loons, and why most people lead lives of quiet desperation.

★ 8.2

Autobiography and memoir

Our life is frittered away by detail…. Simplify, simplify.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 7.8

Autobiography and memoir

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 7.8

Autobiography and memoir

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 which he hears, however measured or far away.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 7.1

Autobiography and memoir

I learned this, at least, by 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 a success unexpected in common hours.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 7.1

Autobiography and memoir

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 7.1

Autobiography and memoir

In the long run men hit only what they aim at.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 5.6

Personal journal

If all men were just, there still would be some, though not so much, need of government.

Abraham Lincoln

1854

★ 5.5

Autobiography and memoir

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end... 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

★ 5.5

Autobiography and memoir

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

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 4.8

Autobiography and memoir

As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 4.0

Autobiography and memoir

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 4.0

Autobiography and memoir

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 3.9

Autobiography and memoir

We can never have enough of nature…. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 3.9

Autobiography and memoir

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 3.9

Autobiography and memoir

By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property...the landscape is deformed.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 3.9

Autobiography and memoir

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 3.8

Autobiography and memoir

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship; three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 3.8

Speech · Political speech

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature—opposition to it, is [in?] his love of justice.

Abraham Lincoln

1854

★ 3.8

Speech · Political speech

I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity.

Abraham Lincoln

1854

★ 3.7

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