Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy or living any where else, but I
This sounds to me like he wasn't very successful at the time he decided to go into the woods, and maybe feeling like he was tossed aside, maybe even a little bitter, and therefore ready to get away from society. Sounds like a typical case of stress.
discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them.
He is speaking of people who are unhappy, yet do nothing to make themselves happy, and still have to audacity to gripe about it
eds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or
This one is so true and timeless. All that really matters is what we think of ourselves and that ultimately makes us who we are.
of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one anot
I felt this to be a very powerful sentence. He's asking why we put so much stock and care into material things instead of each other, and our world.
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by the
I feel that Thoreau is saying that a lot of people just "fall in line' in everyday life, and do what is expected of them, that they can't really enjoy or even entertain a different way of life and they don't even know what they are missing.