Happy Independence Day, America!

Okay, I'm a day early. But I am crazy-busy this week and just wanted to note our Independence Day. Instead of musing effusively over what I love about America, I thought I'd just have excerpts from Henry David Thoreau. On the back of my Signet Classic's edition of Walden, there is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson stating that "No truer American existed than Thoreau." And while everyone has their own American heroes (Thomas Jefferson is one of mine), I think Emerson's classification of Thoreau as a true American is solid. Here's some of my favorite "Walden" quotes...

"In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something higher."

"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."

"To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet."

"Yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries..."

"The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of usawakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, insead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air--to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way."

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

"I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things."

"The universe is wider than our views of it."

"Nay be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought."

"Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil that makes their graves, but have no sympathy to the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads."

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

"Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one ncessary of the soul."

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."

"There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."