Walden Chapter 3 Notes - Reading

Walden Chapter 3 Notes - Reading

1. With a little more deliberatio in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers.

   • Author's residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university.
   • Author could not read while constructing the house because he was too busy, but the prospect of reading really good books afterwards always intrigued him.
   • It is worth it to learn ancient langauges
   • Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were writeen.
   • Reading Greek and Latin is very helpful
   • The symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's speech
   • If you cannot read a book, in whatever language it is written, you cannot fully understand the human race, we have enough books to have all the knowledge in the world but we do not read them.

2. Reading gives us a higher sense of knowledge, and we should be reading all the classics in early grades instead of just focusing on the abcs.

   • Reading all the little kid stories and poems gives these kids the dullness of sight, and are sloughing off all the intellectual faculties.
   • The best books are not even read by those who are called good readers.
   • Even the best english professor can not understand greek and roman poetry.
   • We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper.
   • Books exist for us to explain our miracles and reveal new ones
   • We spend more on bodily ailment then mental ailment
   • Why can't we have sophiscated universities in Concord instead of in Oxford
   • Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.