Henry David Thoreau wore many hats in his life: writer, social reformer, thinker, Trancendentalist, naturalist, teacher, surveyor, walker, lecturer and more. Thoreau’s 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience” helped inspire Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi over a hundred years later in their non-violent fights against oppression, inequality and injustice. Simple living, self sufficiency, self-examination, a deep connection with nature, and an unshakeable belief in individual identity over adhering to the norms of society are core principles expressed over and over again in Thoreau’s works.
Over the years, Thoreau has become highly regarded for being ahead of this time for championing the natural world, advocating for conservation, and promoting environmental consciousness. For anyone interested in reading about how to foster a closer relationship with nature, Walden comes up frequently as a good place to start.
I first read Thoreau as an American high schooler in the early 2000s but have found myself re-reading Walden and essays like “Walking” for clarity and perspective. Thoreau spent as much time as possible outdoors: walking for many hours in the day, climbing mountains. Nature was medicine for him, a space to recharge and reconnect with himself as well as a more authentic way of living, compared to the capitalistic culture arising around him.
From 1845-1847, Thoreau went to live in Walden Pond, just outside of Concord, Massachusetts as an experiment in self-sufficiency, but also to explore the bigger questions in life: what is his purpose here; how should he live; how should be interact with his neighbours and his community more broadly; what laws matter more: society’s or personal conscience? By going into the woods, Thoreau was finding a way to live.
Quotes from Walden
“Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, ‘be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou has left undone?’”
“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, not even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.”
“All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.”
“We must learn to awaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.”
“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.”
“ I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in the summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I saw in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling down in at my west window…”
“…my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel.”
“Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”
“The universe is wider than our view of it.”
“…if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.”
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.”
“Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things to not change; we change.”
Quotes from “Walking”
“Walking” is one of Thoreau’s most significant essays. In it, he argues that we should live in the present moment, be curious about the world around us and especially to what’s local to us, and above all else, to enjoy walking as a pilgrimage into nature and wilderness.
“But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours.”
“Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect to ever see.”
“There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.”
“I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.”
“Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.”
“All good things are wild and free.”
“…there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.”
“Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.”
Find out more
If you’d like to find out more about Thoreau’s life in Walden, and his relationship with nature, here are some further resources:
For a two minute summary on why Thoreau went to live in Walden Woods, here is Larry Buell, Harvard’s Powell M. Cabot Research Professor of American Literature emeritus, reflecting on Walden:
