Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives

i am again finding good company with my old friend Henry David Thoreau. my dog-eared compendium of his writings have carried me through post garden afternoons on the porch, late winter evenings and bouts of GI distress. This past sunday i celebrated his birthday as a spiritual father to us all. his words are eternal; here are a few of my favorites:



"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."


Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have.


That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

Being is the great explainer.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.

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.

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.