瓦尔登湖的英语读书笔记

Reading Note

Walden begins in spring, going through summer, autumn and winter, and finally ends in spring. Thoreau describes in detail his two-year and two-month life in a crude cabin besides the Lake Walden and his thinking during that period in the book. He is supported only by his own labour, living a simple and recluse life.

I like these sentences in the book and most of them are philosophical:

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

2、Y et they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too later to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.

3、But there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre.

4、Confucius said, “To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”

5、The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

6、And if the civilized man’s pursuits the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former?

7、Men say they know many things; But look, they have taken wings—the arts and sciences, and a thousand appliances; the wind that blows is all that any body knows.

8、The only co-operation which is commonly possible is exceedingly partial and superficial; and what little true co-operation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible to men. To co-operate in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together.

9、There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root

10、What is a house but a sedes, a seat?--better if a country seat.

11、For a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

12、While the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicler.

13、Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.

14、We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.

15、Men say that a stitch in time saves nine tomorrow.

16、Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails…With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses…Be it life or death, we crave only reality.

17、The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things.

18、Being seated, to run through the region of the spiritual world; I have had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines.

19、This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a str ange liberty in Nature, a part of herself ….yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled.