Henry David Thoreau

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.

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my mind of equal simplicity.

And I may say innocence with nature herself.

We need the tonic of wildness.

At the same time that we are earners to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable.

That land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

We can never have enough of nature.

Live in each season as it passes.

Breathe the air.

Drink the drink.

Taste the fruit.

And resign yourself to the influence of the earth.

In the morning, I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial.

And I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence.

So remote is its sublimity from our conceptions.

I lay down the book and go to my well for water and lo,

There I meet the servant of the Brahman, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who sits still in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug.

I meet his servant come to draw water for his master,

and our buckets as if it were great together in the same well.

The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.