"I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." So concluded Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 work Walden , a collection of observations made while he lived alone in the woods near Walden Pond for two years in the 1840s. The lessons he learned have since become maxims for living fully and deliberately. Excerpts from Walden are here accompanied by idealistic, wistful paintings.