How we cite our quotes: (Essay.Paragraph)
Quote #1
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 them. (Economy.6)
Thoreau wants his readers to reconsider what freedom and liberty really mean. Surely working day in and day out doesn't qualify. We need to wake up and take advantage of the privileges we have as Americans.
Quote #2
Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? (Economy.14)
Our author celebrates different lifestyles, and thinks that conformity is positively unnatural. He would definitely not be a fan of peer pressure.
Quote #3
By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, he has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. (Economy.17)
It's kind of a long definition of "necessary," but Thoreau has to be this precise for an audience that's lost touch with what necessity really is. For us, the necessaries in life might be family, friends, and a WiFi connection. For Thoreau, it's food, shelter, clothing, and fuel.
Quote #4
I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. (Economy.4)
Thoreau writes about these three animals in such an allegorical way that it's hard to determine whether he ever actually had them all (an odd menagerie) or whether they are merely symbols. If they do symbolize something, what do they symbolize? Some spiritual truth? Worldly goods?
Quote #5
I went to the wood because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. (Where I Lived.16)
This is perhaps the clearest statement of what Thoreau is trying to do at Walden Pond.
Quote #6
Our life is frittered away by detail […] Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! (Where I Lived.17)
Thoreau wants to get rid of all unnecessary "details," to simplify his life to the point where he can get at the truth of what living really means.
Quote #7
Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and needlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. (Bean-Field.15)
Here we get an explanation as to why Thoreau decides to farm his small plot. He doesn't do it for food, since he doesn't eat beans. Instead, he does it because it is a "sacred art," a mode by which he can attain some spiritual truth. Who would have guessed the spiritual powers of the tooting fruit?
Quote #8
The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit – not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. (Spring.9)
It is through nature that Thoreau will attempt to discover the truth of life. In this passage, Nature is literally a book, "living poetry." When we think of poetry, we think of poets (humans, usually). So, whatever truth is, it likely has something to do with the correspondence between Nature and man.
Quote #9
Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness (Spring.25)
Here, wildness is described as if it were a kind of anti-depressant. Aha! Now the St. John's wort thing makes much more sense.
Quote #10
Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise this as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring. (Conclusion.8)
Thoreau feels that too many of us live at the level of "dullest perception." We're stuck in the conventional, the normal. We may as well be asleep, if we don't question and challenge what everybody else considers to be "common sense."