#152

“Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run “amok” against society; but I preferred that society should run “amok” against me, it being the desperate party” (id, 171).

#151

“Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable, and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications.” (id, 136).

#150

“ His [Plato] Dialogues, which contain what is immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are under-bred and low lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsmen who cannot read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper.
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us” (id, 107).

#149

“The work of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing.” (id, 104).

#148

“The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, had done little to bring us nearer to the heroic heroes of antiquity” (id, 100).

#147

“To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip” (id, 94).

#146

“Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay it is overrated; and it is our selfishness that overrates it” (id, 76).

#143

“We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture. We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and the higher state to be forgotten” (id, 37).

#142

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared to our own private opinion” (Thoreau, 2004: 7).

THOREAU, Henry D. (2004). Walden. Oxford, Princeton: Princeton University Press.