Introduction
Note that these quotes are taken out of context: in the first place, because they are extracted from the Notebooks, but also because the author did not publish them in this (or any) context that might better illumine their meaning. This naturally leaves some obscurities and even apparent contradictions. For example, some particular quotes may make Thoreau appear anti-scientific, but that is not at all the case. Indeed, he hoped to contribute to the growing body of scientific knowledge regarding the natural world, but he did consider science a necessarily incomplete undertaking and ultimately unsatisfactory. A more profound appreciation of any object was only possible in its relation to the human and the mysterious transcendent. Rather than avoid including such selections, I have included them, without comment, and trust that the collection as a whole will be clear enough.
Thoreau has been called a Transcendentalist, and he too called himself such, and Transcendentalism is considered a movement of his time that also included the likes of Emerson and Alcott. But to Thoreau, his transcendentalism was not some mere philosophy apart from his daily life, but was his daily life transformed into the transcendental. And he felt that neither his daily life nor transcendentalism had any significance apart from some such personal transformation. So you will find in many of the selections the relating of an observed external fact with an internal state, thought, or feeling. And, conversely, the dependence of that external impression on the internal state. The philosophy expressed in these pages was a lived one, and in that lies its continuing value.
