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 later 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 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.
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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. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe,—“That government is best which governs not at all” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
—Henry David Thoreau
I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.
—Henry David Thoreau
If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
—Henry David Thoreau
Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.
—Henry David Thoreau
Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.
—Henry David Thoreau
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal,
and then leap in the dark to our success.
—Henry David Thoreau
Happiness is like a butterfly. The more you chase it, the more it will elude you; but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.
—Henry David Thoreau
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
That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
—Henry David Thoreau
The mass of men lead quiet lives of desperation.
—Henry David Thoreau
I know no more encouraging fact
than the unquestionable ability of man
to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
—Henry David Thoreau
There is no value in life except
what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place
except what you bring to it yourself.
—Henry David Thoreau
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
—Henry David Thoreau
We will miss everything beautiful in our own lives, because we were too busy hunting something else, losing touch.
—Henry David Thoreau
It’s not enough to be busy.
The question is: What are we busy about?
—Henry David Thoreau
It is only when we forget all
our learning that we begin to know.
—Henry David Thoreau
There is no rule more invariable than that we
are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.
—Henry David Thoreau
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
Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction, a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.
—Henry David Thoreau
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
—Henry David Thoreau
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake,
not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.
—Henry David Thoreau
Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.
—Henry David Thoreau
Live in each season as it passes;
breath the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit,
and resign yourself to the influences of each.
—Henry David Thoreau
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Character
True friendship can afford true knowledge.
It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.
—Henry David Thoreau
The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.
—Henry David Thoreau
It’s not worth our while to let our imperfections disturb us always.
—Henry David Thoreau
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
Goodness is the only investment which never fails.
—Henry David Thoreau
Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.
—Henry David Thoreau
Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Thought, Ideal, Thoughts
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it
—Henry David Thoreau
What we do best or most perfectly is what we have most thoroughly learned by the longest practice, and at length it falls from us without our notice, as a leaf from a tree.
—Henry David Thoreau
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
This world is but a canvas to our imagination.
—Henry David Thoreau
The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.
—Henry David Thoreau
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Reading, Books, Literature, Book
Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.
—Henry David Thoreau
My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature, to know his lurking-places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas in nature.
—Henry David Thoreau
It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
—Henry David Thoreau
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
Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.
—Henry David Thoreau
The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Riches, Virtue, Wealth
To enhance the quality of the day…
That is the highest of the arts.
—Henry David Thoreau
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,
and endeavors to live the life which he had imagined,
he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
—Henry David Thoreau
The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality.
—Henry David Thoreau
Topics: Values
I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of a coarse jest, yet when you speak earnestly and seriously on the subject, is silent.
—Henry David Thoreau
Related Authors
- Ralph Waldo Emerson American Philosopher
- Amos Bronson Alcott American Teacher
- Walt Whitman American Poet
- Mortimer J. Adler American Philosopher, Educator
- Charles Sanders Peirce American Philosopher
- Khalil Gibran Lebanese-born American Philosopher
- Will Durant American Historian, Philosopher
- George Santayana Spanish Philosopher
- John Cage American Composer, Philosopher
- Dwight Macdonald American Film Critic