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
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
The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.
—Henry David Thoreau
There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Marriage
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
We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Understanding
The mass of men lead quiet lives of desperation.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Courage, Individuality
Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Poverty, The Poor
Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone. It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Thought, Exploration, Self-Knowledge
We will miss everything beautiful in our own lives, because we were too busy hunting something else, losing touch.
—Henry David Thoreau
I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Criticism, Critics, Bitterness
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Book, Books
Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Honesty, Virtues, Truth
None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Age, Time, Enthusiasm
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Morality, Morals
Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Farming
The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Life
What wisdom, what warning can prevail against gladness? There is no law so strong that a little gladness may not transgress.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Happiness
However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Change, Creativity, Poverty
After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Sin
What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Earth, Living
Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Worry
Most are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man’s nobler faculties
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Business
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Liberty
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Science, Technology, Attention
The heart is forever inexperienced.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Emotions
Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day – farther and wider – and rest thee by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played.
—Henry David Thoreau
I felt a positive yearning toward one bush this afternoon. There was a match found for me at last. I fell in love with a shrub oak.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Nature
Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Acceptance, Awareness, Realistic Expectations, Realization, Expectations
Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Politics
There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist—and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker. That is active duty, says the Vishnu Purana, which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness; all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Law
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Ralph Waldo Emerson American Philosopher
Amos Bronson Alcott American Teacher
Mortimer J. Adler American Philosopher, Educator
John Cage American Composer
Charles Sanders Peirce American Philosopher
Walt Whitman American Poet
Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
Kahlil Gibran Lebanese-born American Philosopher
Will Durant American Historian
George Santayana Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher