Today I read Thoreau. Wanted to share his top 10 most sovereign quotes.
1. “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.”
2. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
—Walden
3. “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.”
—Walden
4. “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
—Walden
5. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
—Civil Disobedience
6. “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
—Walden
7. “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
—A Plea for Captain John Brown
8. “I heartily accept the motto,—‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.”
—Civil Disobedience
9. “Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.”
—Walden
10. “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.”
—Walking
