This is another book you can download for free from Manybooks.net
Pretty much everybody I know who is into the woods / outdoors / nature scene loves this book.
If you don’t know the story, the author goes into the woods, builds a cabin, and lives kind of like a hermit for a while, an writes down his observations on how nice it is to be in the woods, and why being a farmer or a merchant in town is a waste of time.
Everybody knows a thousand and one famous quotations from Walden, but here are a few of my favorites.
For my fellow curmudgeons and misanthropes:
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Perhaps of interest to vegetarians:
I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind.
Certainly no nation that lived simply in all respects, that is, no nation of philosophers, would commit so great a blunder as to use the labor of animals.
And, my all time favorite:
As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
I give Walden 5 Jihadis out of 5
Studious people may also want to read Ken Kifer’s analysis of Walden. It’s a little over my head, but maybe you are smarter than me, and will enjoy it.
