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 falsely attribute to men a determined character—putting together all their yesterdays—and averaging them—we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support—it is worse than a large family—he is the silent poor indeed.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Character
That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another s. We see so much only as we possess.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Virtues, Virtue
I have never found a companion so companionable as solitude.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Solitude
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Friendship, Solitude
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Books, Book
In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Mathematics
Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Passion
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, Books, Literature
So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Attitude
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Morality, Virtue, Morals, Cheating, Advice, Value
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Solitude, Independence
My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologies. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought—with these I deal.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Facts
Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Doubt
For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Books
A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe?
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Leisure, Rest
We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Potential
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Feelings, Love, Romance
It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific The Body dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. As when astronomers call the lately discovered planet Neptune; or the asteroid Astr
—Henry David Thoreau
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Taxes, Taxation
The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.
—Henry David Thoreau
The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Mistakes
The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Conflict
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: News
Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Faith
What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.
—Henry David Thoreau
Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: The Body, Work
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured and far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Individuality, Purpose, Goals, Friendship, Attitude, Success, Courage
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined! As you simplify your life, the laws of the Universe will be simpler, solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Courage, Work, Assurance, New, Life, Achievements, Ambition, Live, Confidence, Dream, Secrets of Success, General, Goals, Simplicity, Reason, Dreams, Thought, Success
What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Philosophy, Philosophers
The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Knowledge
Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Wealth
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
Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: One liners, Ability, Wealth
I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limit of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extravagance! it depends on how you are yarded.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Identity
With all your science can you tell me how it is, and when it is, that light comes into the soul?
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Light, Soul
You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds.
—Henry David Thoreau
The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Work
The only wealth is life.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Money, Wealth
To inherit property is not to be born—it is to be still-born, rather.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Inheritance
Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Government
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