The merely political aspect of the land is never very cheering; men are degraded when considered as the members of a political organization.

If you take this life to be simply what old religious folks pretend (I mean the effete, gone to seed in a drought, mere human galls stung by the devil once), then all your joy and serenity is reduced to grinning and bearing it. The fact is, you have got to take the world on your shoulders like Atlas, and "put along" with it. You will do this for an idea's sake, and your success will be in proportion to your devotion to ideas. It may make your back ache occasionally, but you will have the satisfaction of hanging it or twirling it to suit yourself.

Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.

Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th,1847.

Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse.

Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar's atmosphere.

When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country [Mexico] is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.