Walden by Henry David Thoreau

In the July of 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a small cabin that he had built on the shores of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Thus was started one of America’s most famous experiments in the art of simple living. For two years and two months, Thoreau lived off the land, restricting his needs to the bare essentials of life. This allowed him the freedom and the solitude to commune with Nature, to read, and to contemplate on the mysteries of life and human needs as opposed to human desires. 

Some excerpts –

“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.”

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”

“The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what we do; and yet how much is not done by us!”

“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.”

“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?”

‘Walden’ is considered both a literary classic, and a philosophical treatise on the alternative to the usual American Dream; it’s a repudiation of rampant materialism, the usual charge made against America.