Henry David Thoreau 1817 – 1862
Henry David Thoreau was a 19th-century American philosopher, essayist, and naturalist, the second major figure of the Transcendentalist movement after Ralph Waldo Emerson, his mentor and friend. His 1854 book Walden, written during the two years he lived in a small cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, is a foundational text of American nature writing and a meditation on simplicity, self-sufficiency, and the relation between the individual and society. His 1849 essay Civil Disobedience, written in response to his refusal to pay a poll tax in protest against slavery and the Mexican-American War, articulated a doctrine of nonviolent resistance to unjust government that influenced Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. He spent most of his life in Concord, Massachusetts, working as a surveyor and pencil-maker while producing a body of journals, essays, and books central to American letters.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Era
- Modern
- Movements
- Transcendentalism
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Henry David Thoreau:
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
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Attributed to Henry David Thoreau:
“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.”
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Attributed to Henry David Thoreau:
“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.”
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Attributed to Henry David Thoreau:
“Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
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Attributed to Henry David Thoreau:
“That government is best which governs least.”