Most of the time we don’t see the full passage of this, his famous advice on how to live, the opposite of which everybody seems to be living today. Here is what psychiatrists should be dispensing instead of pills:
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
(Quoted from page 215 of Walden and “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” by Henry David Thoreau. Signet Classic, 1960.)
For a brief biography of Henry David Thoreau, click here. For images of or relating to Henry David Thoreau, click here.
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