Thoreau on "Simplicity" (from Walden)

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as
two or three, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail…


I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.
To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome
and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the
companion that was so companionable as solitude…


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…


A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener.
So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts.
We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and
took advantage of every accident that befell us. Sometimes,
in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath,
I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a
revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in
undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing
around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the
sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some
traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded
of the lapse of time.


+ Henry David Thoreau, excerpts from Walden