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“The universe is wider than our views of it”

—Henry David Thoreau

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live”

—Henry David Thoreau

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

“I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.”

—Henry David Thoreau

“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

“I want to be left alone. I want to sit in the grass. I want to ride my horse. I want to lay a woman naked in the grass on the mountainside. I want to think. I want to pray. I want to sleep. I want to look at the stars. I want what I want. I want to get and prepare my own food, with my own hands, and live that way. I want to roll my own. I want to smoke some deermeat and pack it in my saddlebag, and go away over the bluff. I want to read books. I want to write books. I’ll write books in the woods. Thoreau was right…” ”

——Kerouac, Letter to Allen Ginsberg, June 10, 1949

“All good things are wild and free”

—Thoreau

“What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.”

—Henry David Thoreau

“How to live. How to get the most life. . . . How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my every-day business. I am as busy as a bee about it. I ramble all over the fields on that errand, and am never so happy as when I feel myself heavy with honey and wax.”

—Thoreau was not exactly a hermit. Another Thoreau gem here.

“One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with”; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
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