Sublime

Whitman, in Leaves of Grass, warned against this self-defeating prejudice: “Of Equality—As if it harm’d me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself—As if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possessed the same.”

I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually.

Où j’ai vécu, et pour quoi j’ai vécu

Nul n’est tenu de se placer dans une telle situation vis-à-vis de la société, mais chacun doit se maintenir dans la situation, quelle qu’elle soit, où il se trouve en obéissant aux lois de son être, et ce ne sera jamais en opposition à un gouvernement juste, si par hasard il en trouve un.

I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice—for my greatest skill has been to want but little—so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I contemplated

A saner man would have found himself often enough “in formal opposition” to what are deemed “the most sacred laws of society,” through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his resolution without going out of his way. It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to

Aux antipodes des faux dandys qui croient qu’en affectant une mise extravagante ils le seront, Thoreau savait que le véritable dandysme est une ascèse intérieure visible de soi seul. Elle propose une « construction de soi » à l’opposé de « la vie mesquine4 ». Dans Le Peintre de la vie moderne, Baudelaire analyse le dandysme et le voit déjà chez