Walden: or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau is one of the most inspiring books I ever read.

In 1845, Thoreau (1817-62) built a cabin at Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. In his book, he explains why he went to live there: “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...

“Men labour under a mistake. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, in laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt, and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.”

His solution to the problem of economic survival was not to earn more but to need less - to see if he might make himself richer by making his wants fewer. Rather than accumulating things - possessions - Thoreau wanted the richness of time.

At the end of his “experiment in living”, Thoreau wrote: “I learnt this, at least, by my experiment: if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours... If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

It has been said that Thoreau was “a great craftsman whose trade was sentences”. In one quotable sentence after another, Walden confirms the dictum that the best prose is poetry.