I am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks.
Henry David ThoreauThere are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.
Henry David ThoreauIf it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man,--and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages,--it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Henry David ThoreauThe village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river.... The word is from the Latin villa, which together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried.... Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without traveling themselves.
Henry David Thoreau