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
We are constantly invited to be who we are.
—Henry David Thoreau
Public opinion is a weak tyrant, compared with our private opinion – what a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates his fate.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Awareness, Fate, Acceptance, Opinion, Opinions, Optimism, Realization, Confidence, Positive Attitudes, Public opinion
Glances of true beauty can be seen in the faces of those who live in true meekness.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Strength
I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning when nobody calls.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Solitude
The universe is wider than our views of it.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Universe, The Universe
No man ever followed his genius until it misled him.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Genius
The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Friendship, Feelings
Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident – It is as common as life.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Death
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Books, Reading, Literature, Book
Gnaw your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, gnaw it still.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Perseverance, Resolve, Endurance
Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Dreams
I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Generations
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say let your affairs be as one, two, three and to a hundred or a thousand … We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Simplicity
There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Work
Sobriety, severity, and self-respect are the foundations of all true sociality.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Society
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Voting
Did you ever hear of a man who had striven all his life faithfully and singly toward an object, and in no measure obtained it? If a man constantly aspires, is he not elevated? Did ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them-that it was a vain endeavor?
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Desires, Doing Your Best, Goals, Desire
This life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Self-Pity, Satisfaction, Hedonism
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Action
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
If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Achievement
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Rich, Wealth, Appreciation, Leadership, Blessings, Gratitude
Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let them be your only diet, drink, and botanical medicines.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Seasons, Living, Time
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: Experience, Give, Live, Life
You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: People
Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life … would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Reality
It is strange that men will talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Love
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only indispensible, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Wealth
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Books
Spring is a natural resurrection, an experience in immortality.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Fame
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