Henry David Thoreau Quotes on Life
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) — the record of the two years, two months, and two days he spent in a self-built cabin on Walden Pond between 1845 and 1847 — gave nineteenth-century American philosophy its most enduring meditation on the well-lived life. The central question — to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to discover whether one has not lived at all — frames the experimental simplification of material conditions Thoreau undertakes as the precondition of authentic philosophical attention to nature, work, and self. The framework, integrating with the Concord Transcendentalism of Emerson and the political dissent of Civil Disobedience (1849), shaped the subsequent American tradition of nature writing, environmentalism, and ethical individualism through John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, and the broader American countercultural reception.
Quotes
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“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
p. 10 -
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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“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.”
p. 18 -
Attributed to Henry David Thoreau:
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
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“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.”
p. 364 | Commonly misquoted, converted to imperative mood, as "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". -
Attributed to Henry David Thoreau:
“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.”
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Attributed to Henry David Thoreau:
“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.”
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“But now I see I was not plucked for naught, And after in life's vase Of glass set while I might survive, But by a kind hand brought Alive To a strange place.”
Sic Vita", st. 6. The Dial (July 1841) p. 82 -
“The life that I aspire to live No man proposeth me— No trade upon the street Wears its emblazonry.”
The Black Knight", l. 11. The Dial (October 1842) p. 180