Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. Never look back unless you are planning to go that way. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. Be not simply good, be good for something. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.ĭo not be too moral. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us. It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. Simplify, simplify, simplify! 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 thumb-nail." I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. 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 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.
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