MeJackson

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one."

              -Walden, Conclusion

-This quote immediately caught my question right off the bat (not to mention it's the first two lines.) Here, I believe Thoreau was trying to explain that he never would have found time later in life to go to Walden and live out in the woods and he didn't want to give up this opprotunity. After being out in the woods for a while, this reason was also the reason why he left. He did take the opprotunity to live in the woods and now he has many other things to accomplish in life, maybe other things he'd never be able to get around too if he continued to live in the woods.

"I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open."

          -Walden, Conclusion

-Thoreau didn't even spend a week before making his own trail through the woods to the shores of the pond. If it didn't take him a week to make that track, then we can assume he went there frequently throughout the day. When he 'fears' that others have walked on his path to the lake, I think he's actually physically afraid and accepting of the fact that other people went there. If he was actually physically afraid, then he probably didn't want other people to get inspiration from the pond or just the nature around them like he did. But, he wasn't physically afraid, then he accepts that from the five-six years he wasn't there, someone else has found his trail and decided to see nature for what it is...beautiful.

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer."

           -Walden, Conclusion

-This quote made me immeidately think to the line, 'Walk to the beat of your own drum.' Thoreau is pretty much saying that if one man is different from all of his friends, then he is not thinking the same way that he is, or have the same mind set and is 'walking to the beat of his own drum.'

"If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me."

            =Walden, Conclusion

-Well, once I found out what a garret meant (it's kind of like a loft; it has a floor with an open space at the top of the house just underneath the roof) this quote had me thinking for a few minutes about what Thoreau was trying to say. I believe he was trying to say that if he was stuck in a corner of the highest place he could get to and look down at everybody, he could see for a long ways, thinking about people and why they do this and that.

0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0

-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0

"Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong..."

              -Civil Disobedience

-This quote caught my attention rather quickly. By majorities I assume he meant people in the higher/rich class. Here Thoreau is wondering if there could ever be a time where it's not the higher class citizens that decide what is right and what is wrong. These people could easily use their beliefs on what is right and wrong to manipulate those less fortunate.

"I have paid no poll tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way."

-This quote explains why Thoreau was put in jail. He believes that the people put him in jail just so they could do something to him and get him out of the way of other problems that could arise. Thoreau thought his reason for being locked up was silly and thought that being put in jail was the only, and the best thing, that the government could do as a punishment.

"If a plant cannot live according to nature, it dies; and so a man..."

-This quote goes back to the topic that nature is the universe, and a human's soul is the universe. So when a plant dies, so does a man because they're all connected into a bigger picture. I think he's also trying to say if a man can't live according to nature (the customs of a city or a country) then he too will die because he can't adapt to what he can do to survive.