People

Henry David Thoreau 1817–1862 United States

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."   Henry David Thoreau [Walden, or, Life in the Woods]

Questions of 

Transcendentalism, themes of individualism, materialism, technology, progress and nature

Reading

Writing available on the net

• Cape Cod
• Civil Disobedience (html)
• Civil Disobedience (html) (in two parts)
• Civil Disobedience - HTML, numbered paragraphs
• Resistance to Civil Government, or Civil Disobedience
• Life Without Principle trancendentalists.com
• Life Without Principle Yale
• The Maine Woods eserver
• A Plea for Captain John Brown Yale
• Slavery in Massachusetts
• Walden
• Walking
•  
• Natural History of Massachusetts (Vol. III, No. 1, July, 1842, p. 19.)
• The Laws of Menu (Vol. III, No. 3, Jan., 1843, p. 331.)
• Ethnical Scriptures: Chinese Four Books (Vol. IV, No. 2, Oct., 1843, p. 205.)
• Ethnical Scriptures: Sayings of Confucius (Vol. III, No. 4, April, 1843, p. 493.)

  Journals of Emerson and Thoreau  - some excerpts

   

Commentaries

Quotations

It is never too late to give up your prejudices. Walden

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. Walden

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. Walden

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

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. Walden

Things do not change; we change. Journal

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

So behave that the odor of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere, that when we behold or scent a flower, we may not be reminded how inconsistent your deeds are with it; for all odor is but one form of advertisement of a moral quality, and if fair actions had not been performed, the lily would not smell sweet. The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal.

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. Civil Disobedience

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

As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full.

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate oddfellow society.

Also: Thoreau's invention of the term "mutual admiration society"