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Authors Writer Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

American writer and philosopher · 1817–1862

Essayist and transcendentalist known for Walden, civil disobedience and influential writing on nature and society.

Lifetime
Jul 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862 (age 44)
Primary field
Writer
Secondary fields
Philosopher Activist
Influenced by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tags
TranscendentalismWaldenCivil disobedienceNaturalistAbolitionismHarvard University

Henry David Thoreau was an American writer, philosopher and naturalist associated with the transcendentalist movement. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, he studied at Harvard College and later worked as a teacher, lecturer, surveyor and writer. His best-known book, Walden, published in 1854, drew on the two years he spent living in a small cabin near Walden Pond. It examined simple living, self-reliance, nature and the relationship between individuals and society.

Thoreau also became known for his political and moral essays. After refusing to pay a poll tax in protest against slavery and the Mexican-American War, he spent a night in jail. The experience informed his essay commonly known as Civil Disobedience, which argued that individuals should not cooperate with governments when conscience requires resistance. Thoreau was also an outspoken opponent of slavery. His writings later influenced environmental thought and movements advocating non-violent political resistance.

Quotations

“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 or far away.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”

Henry David Thoreau · Resistance to Civil Government, 1849 · Primary source

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“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.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“Any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one already.”

Henry David Thoreau · Resistance to Civil Government, 1849 · Primary source

“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

Henry David Thoreau · Resistance to Civil Government, 1849 · Primary source

“There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”

Henry David Thoreau · Resistance to Civil Government, 1849 · Primary source

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“For my greatest skill has been to want but little.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“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.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“I heartily accept the motto,—‘That government is best which governs least;’ and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.”

Henry David Thoreau · Resistance to Civil Government, 1849 · Primary source

“For our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“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 · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.”

Henry David Thoreau · Resistance to Civil Government, 1849 · Primary source

“And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter,—we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

“For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done for ever.”

Henry David Thoreau · Resistance to Civil Government, 1849 · Primary source

“Things do not change; we change.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1849 · Primary source

Selected works

Essay · 1849 FEATURED WORK
Resistance to Civil Government

An argument for individual conscience over unjust state authority, examining taxation, slavery, war, resistance, and the moral limits of government.

Book · 1849 FEATURED WORK
Walden

An account of simple living at Walden Pond that examines self-reliance, nature, material needs, society, work, and deliberate living.

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