Walden: Life in the Woods

When I wrote the following pages, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbour, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of a pond in Massachusetts, and earned my living by the work of my own hands. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am once more a visitor in civilised life.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to face only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, so that I should not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and to suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily as to put to rout all that was not life.

Most men, it seems to me, lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate town you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of small creatures. 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.

The mass of men live meanly, like ants, spending the best part of their lives earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it. Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand. Instead of a million, count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail. Simplify, simplify. Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails.