Watt Key Quotes

I like the story about Henry David Thoreau, who, when he was on his death bed, his family sent for a minister. The minister said, 'Henry, have you made your peace with God?' Thoreau said, 'I didn't know we'd quarreled.'

When you're reading Thoreau you look at Hollywood differently, let me tell ya!

Transcendentalists like Emerson were searching for unity in nature, but resisted what seemed to them the blinkered reliance on deductive reasoning and empirical research enforced by encroaching science.

Henry David Thoreau, who never earned much of a living or sustained a relationship with any woman that wasn't brotherly -- who lived mostly under his parents' roof . . . who advocated one day's work and six days "off" as the weekly round and was considered a bit of a fool in his hometown . . . is probably the American writer who tells us best how to live comfortably with our most constant companion, ourselves.

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. 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 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.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.

Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can't get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head.

I don't collaborate. You're born alone, you die alone, you get on stage alone.

The other thing that happened in 1883 was my reading of Thoreau's Walden.

I don't belong to anyone.

I'm in the loners' society. I don't want to classify myself as anything.

The rare few, who, early in life have rid themselves of the friendship of the many.

When a man cuts himself absolutely adrift from custom, what an astonishingly light spar floats him! How few his wants are, after all!

Radical individualism can be very sad.

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.

Any man who is really a man must learn to be alone in the midst of others, to think alone for others, and, if necessary, against others.

Be an outcast. Be pleased to walk alone.

Just me and my nuts, that's all I got in this world.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

I'm one of those perverse people who likes being alone. I always took myself to be a community of one. That's what I am comfortable with.

There is an intense but simple thrill in setting off in the morning on a mountain trail, knowing that everything you need is on your back. It is a confidence in having left the inessentials behind and of entering a world of natural beauty that has not been violated, where money has no value, and possessions are a dead weight. The person with the fewest possessions is the freest. Thoreau was right.

Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

To every man it is decreed: Thou shalt live alone. Happy they who imagine that they have escaped the common lot; happy, whilst they imagine it.

Born alone, die alone, no crew to keep my crown or throne

I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or State, to my circle of friends or even to my own family... Such isolation is sometimes bitter, but I do not regret being cut off from the understanding and sympathy of other men. I lose something by it,to be sure, but I am compensated for it in being rendered independent of the customs, opinions and prejudices of others, and am not tempted to rest my peace of mind upon such shifting foundations.