Orts #829

Next Wednesday, July 12 2017, is Henry David Thoreau's 200th birthday.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at.
     — Thoreau, Walden

If a person lost would conclude that after all he is not lost, he is not beside himself, but standing in his own old shoes on the very spot where he is, and that for the time being he will live there; but the places that have known him, they are lost,-- how much anxiety and danger would vanish. I am not alone if I stand by myself. Who knows where in space this globe is rolling? Yet we will not give ourselves up for lost, let it go where it will.
 - Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Tuesday

We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our friends' thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed; when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be.
  - ibid., Wednesday

Some hard and dry book in a dead language, which you have found it impossible to read at home, but for which you have still a lingering regard, is the best to carry with you on a journey.
  - ibid., Thursday

He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.
  - ibid., Friday