My family and I lived for several years in Sudbury (MA) and my office was in Concord nearby. Our three sons learned to swim in Walden Pond until classes were no longer conducted at this historical site. Henry David Thoreau has always been one of my favorite authors and I cherish his contributions to the enlightenment and enrichment of human rights throughout the world. Mohandis Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Dietrich Bonnhoeffer, and Martin Luther King Jr. were among his most devoted admirers.
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o What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
o I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
o Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
o A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
o Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
o Be not simply good – be good for something.
o Things do not change; we change.
o If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
o What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?
o This world is but a canvas to our imagination.
o What is once well done is done forever.
o Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
o I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
o 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.
o The heart is forever inexperienced.
o 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.
o 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.
o It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.
o Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?
o There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.
o Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
o I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.
o 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.
o There is no remedy for love but to love more.
o Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
o I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
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Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American philosopher, poet, and environmental scientist whose major work, Walden, draws upon each of these identities in meditating on the concrete problems of living in the world as a human being. He sought to revive a conception of philosophy as a way of life, not only a mode of reflective thought and discourse. Thoreau’s work was informed by an eclectic variety of sources. He was well-versed in classical Greek and Roman philosophy, ranging from the pre-Socratics through the Hellenistic schools, and was also an avid student of the ancient scriptures and wisdom literature of various Asian traditions. He was familiar with modern philosophy ranging from Descartes, Locke and the Cambridge Platonists through Emerson, Coleridge, and the German Idealists, all of whom are influential on Thoreau’s philosophy. He discussed his own scientific findings with leading naturalists of the day, and read the latest work of Humboldt and Darwin with interest and admiration.
Here is a direct link to more information about Henry David Thoreau’s life and work.
Here is a link to my favorite biography of him, Laura Dassow Walls’s Henry David Thoreau: A Life, published by University of Chicago Press (2018).