Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) was a 19th-century American writer, naturalist, and philosopher. He was also an anti-slavery activist, a transcendentalist, and a passionate advocate of self-sufficiency and individualism.
Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, studied at Harvard and apprenticed at his father’s pencil workshop. He did not like his next job as a schoolteacher because he didn’t want to dispense corporal punishment on his students. He then developed a friendship with his benefactor, the essayist and transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who offered him a substitute family and a springboard to a life of letters.
Thoreau was also a champion of the simple life, a lover of nature, and an opponent of the modern. In his seminal work, Walden; or, A Life in the Woods (1854,) he made a show of back-to-the-earth living during a two-year-two-month-and-two-day period when he holed up in a tiny log cabin on the edge of a pond in the woods outside Concord, Massachusetts. There, far away from society, he sought solitude to discover the simple, yet revolutionary answers to the meaning of life.
On one occasion, Thoreau spent a night in prison for refusing to pay taxes to a government that approved slavery and pursued an imperialist war against Mexico. Based on this encounter, he wrote Civil Disobedience debating that individual conscience takes precedence over political expediency. His evocation of passive resistance in this influential essay motivated peacemakers and writers alike—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr., W. B. Yeats, and Leo Tolstoy. His work also stimulated such reformist movements as prison reform, universal suffrage, abolitionism, and environmentalism.
Thoreau developed a penchant for Hinduism and yoga. He died in 1862 at age 44 before receiving any approbation for his writing and its global influence. His simple philosophy on learning from nature has inspired many ecological and environmental movements. Walden is taught in schools and is read meticulously by green-leaning people around the world.
Thoreau is one of America’s most quoted writers.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Henry David Thoreau
Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Fear
One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Flowers
In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Truth, Fame, Family, Fear, Change
You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds.
—Henry David Thoreau
If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Names, Identity
Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Inspirational, Inspiration, Audiences
What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Value
Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds!
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Wilderness
I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Action
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth,—certainly the machine will wear out.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Government
The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Friendship, Feelings
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Reading, Literature, Books
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Books, Reading, Literature
Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Experience
Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Speech, Poets, Poetry
Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Thought
Man is the artificer of his own happiness.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Self-reliance, Confidence, Happiness
Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Passion
Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Thoughts, Thought
To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Laziness, Idleness
Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Property
In wilderness is the preservation of the world.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Wilderness, World
All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms, as all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is.
—Henry David Thoreau
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Solitude, Adversity
Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.
—Henry David Thoreau
I wanted to live deep and suck out all he marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swatch 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 or if it were sublime to know it by experience and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Give, Live, Life, Experience
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Rich, Gratitude, Blessings, Wealth, Appreciation, Leadership
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?
—Henry David Thoreau
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in Paradise. Love your life.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Nature, Blessings, Living, Courage, Positive Attitudes, Optimism, Life
After all the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Conflict
I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Imagination
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Liberty
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Caution
I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: World
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing, Art
Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Winter, Seasons
The law will never make men free, it is men that have to make the law free.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Society, Freedom, Law
It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Conscience
Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Health
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