"... low
expectation."
"Good Reads" Thoreau Quotations
NPR now collaborates with TED to feature segments of previous TED Talks interspersed
with "live" interview.
Check out the Barry Schwartz's TED radio segment, "The Pursuit of
Happiness." http://www.npr.org/2012/05/02/151881205/the-pursuit-of-happiness
There are three basic attitudes toward life: "More,"
"Enough" and "Less."
When "More" becomes a continual source of
dissatisfaction, happiness is diminished and often destroyed.
***
As the following quotations illustrate, Thoreau was the first American to realize the indispensable value of
minimalism:
"My greatest skill has been to want but little."
"It is the
greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all. I found it invariably
true, the poorer I am the richer I am."
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
"Simplicity,
simplicity, simplicity! We are happy in proportion to the things we can do
without."
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be
simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor
weakness weakness.
There is no more fatal blunderer than he who
consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. "Life
Without Principle"
Men have become the tools of their tools.
"God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never
be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at
all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of
the reality which surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers
to our conceptions. "Walden; or, Life
in the Woods, Where I Lived, and What I Lived"
He who gives himself entirely to his fellow men appears to them
useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them in pronounced a
benefactor and philanthropist. Civil Disobedience
An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the
community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to
the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put in office.
Let your
life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at
any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn. Civil
Disobedience
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with
the song still in them.”
“...be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody
else's idea of yourself should be.”
“Not till we are completely lost or
turned around... do we begin to find ourselves.”
Distrust any enterprise that requires new
clothes.
Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase
it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things,
it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.”
“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without
books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and
speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not
even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, to life itself than this
incessant business.”
He will get to the goal first who stands stillest.
(Blaise Pascal: "Most of humankind's problems arise from the inability to sit
still in a room.")
A man
is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
Thoreau House Replica
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