Thoreau's thoughts. Selections.. ( 1890) PDF book
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| Thoreau's thoughts. Selections |
In selecting the following passages from Thoreau's printed works, for the use of those who are already interested in him, and to win, if possible, new admirers of what has given me so pure and unfailing a satisfaction for now more than forty years, I desired to make a pocket volume, containing beautiful and helpful thoughts, which one might not only read in retirement, but use as a traveling companion, while waiting at a hotel, railway station, or elsewhere, — something even more convenient and ready at hand than the newspaper.
I would furnish an antidote to the dissipating, depressing influence of too much newspaper reading, something which instead of filling the mind with gossip, political strife, and misstatement, athletics, pugilism, accounts of shocking accidents, and every kind of criminality, may refresh us with a new sense of the beauty of the world, and make us feel how truly life is worth living.
The book is illustrating the philosophy of Thoreau by giving long quotes from his book with the sources.
Animal food It is hard to provide and cook
offends the imagination.
So Simple and clean a diet as will not offend the imagination ; but this, I think, is to be fed when we feed the body ; they should both sit down at the same table.
It may be vain to ask why the imagination will not be reconciled to flesh and fat. I am satisfied that it is not. Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized. Walden p. 232.
