A Stone's Thoreau

How you can overrun a country, climb any rampart, and carry any fortress, with an army of alert thoughts! - thoughts that send their bullets home to heaven's door - with which you can take the whole world, without paying for it, or robbing any body. See the conquering hero comes! You fail in your thoughts, or you prevail in your thoughts only.

If he is in love, he loves; if he is in heaven he enjoys, if he is in hell he suffers. It is his condition that determines his locality.

Cowards suffer, heroes enjoy.

How prompt are we to satisfy the hunger & thirst of our bodies; how slow to satisfy the hunger & thirst of our souls. Indeed we who would be practical folks cannot use this word without blushing because of our infidelity, having starved this substance almost to a shadow...Haven't we ourselves everlasting life to get? And isn't that the only excuse at last for eating drinking sleeping or even carrying an umbrella when it rains?

The whole enterprise of this nation which is not an upward, but a westward one, toward Oregon, California, Japan, &c, is totally devoid of interest to me, whether performed on foot or by a Pacific railroad. It is not illustrated by a thought, it is not warmed by a sentiment, there is nothing in it which one should lay down his life for, nor even his gloves, hardly which one should take up a newspaper for. It is perfectly heathenish - a filibustering toward heaven by the great western route. No, they may go their way to their manifest destiny which I trust is not mine.

Though it is late to leave off this wrong way, it will seem early the moment we being in the right way; instead of mid-afternoon, it will be early morning with us. We have not got half way to dawn yet.

These are the regions of the Known & of the Unknown. What is the use of going right over the old track again? There is an adder in the path which your own feet have worn. You must make tracks into the Unknown. That is what you have your board & clothes for. Why do you ever mend your clothes, unless that, wearing them, you may mend your ways? Let us sing.