“I went to the woods 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.”

What does it mean?

Thoreau left busy town life to live simply in nature. He wanted to focus on what really matters, so that at the end of his life he would not feel he had wasted it.

Key vocabulary

deliberately

on purpose, after careful thought

front

an old use meaning to face or deal with directly

essential

most basic and important

• “Things do not change; we change.”– Henry David Thoreau
• “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves.”– Henry David Thoreau