1st - Themes: Self - Reliance
Living Simply
Social Criticism
Technology
Visions of America
Meaning of Existence
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
"To be awake is to be alive."
Live your life according to your convictions; have the courage to be different, regardless of what others say.
Living "simply" frees you of the worry about material possessions and rewards you with more time for what really counts.
Chapter 1 - ECONOMY
DEFINITION (from dictionary.com)
- thrifty management; frugality in expenditure or consumption of money materials
- the management of the resources of a community
- the prosperity or earnings of a place
Questions:
What is real wealth?
What are the necessities of life?
Do luxuries corrupt? Humans work their entire lives for luxuries.
What does it mean to be philanthropic?
Discuss Thoreau's house?
Quotes: "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."
Example - house that costs $800 and which takes ten to fifteen years to pay off
"But lo! men have become the tools of their tools."
"Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made."
Transportation - "the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot." The fare of a train is almost a day's wages.
"This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it."
CHAPTER 2 - "Where I Lived and What For"
He goes to Walden Pond because he wishes to live deliberately, to slow down the fast pace of modern life and actually enjoy it. He claims that you can't learn anything from newspapers about live ("The Revolution will not be Televised")
Quotes:
"As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes little difference whether you are committed to a farm or a county jail."
"Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering?"
"The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life."
"I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?"
"Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity."
"We do not ride on the railroads; it rides upon us."
"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?"
"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip."
"Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature."
"I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born."
Chapter 3 READING
Reading literature is the closest thing to live.
Reading great books requires training such training as athletes undergo.
Nothing truly can be translated.
"Most men have learned to read to serve paltry convenience, as they learned to ciper in order to keep accounts... but reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a higher sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury .. but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to."
"The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers."
"I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannont read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects."
"We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment."
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