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    Quotable Thoreau: An A to Z Glossary of Inspiring Quotations from Henry David Thoreau
    Quotable Thoreau: An A to Z Glossary of Inspiring Quotations from Henry David Thoreau
    Quotable Thoreau: An A to Z Glossary of Inspiring Quotations from Henry David Thoreau
    Ebook166 pages1 hour

    Quotable Thoreau: An A to Z Glossary of Inspiring Quotations from Henry David Thoreau

    By Henry David Thoreau and Janine Cooper Ayres

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    QUOTABLE THOREAU -- An A to Z Glossary of Inspiring Quotes from Henry David Thoreau -- author of Walden and 'Civil Disobedience' -- covering a wide variety of subjects from Advice to Zanzibar -- a collection of gems of wit and wisdom from a great American writer, essayist, naturalist, environmentalist, transcendentalist, abolitionist and tax resister. Also includes portraits and nature photos. Thoreau is still one of the most quoted, and influential, of American writers. Why not add some of Thoreau's gems to your collection?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateJul 26, 2013
    ISBN9781483503851
    Quotable Thoreau: An A to Z Glossary of Inspiring Quotations from Henry David Thoreau
    Author

    Henry David Thoreau

    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American author and naturalist. A leading figure of Transcendentalism, he is best remembered for Walden, an account of the two years he spent living in a cabin on the north shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, and for Civil Disobedience, an essay that greatly influenced the abolitionist movement and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

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      Book preview

      Quotable Thoreau - Henry David Thoreau

      Project

      INTRODUCTION

      HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862)

      Henry David Thoreau rarely traveled far from Concord, Massachusetts, where he was born. Yet he wrote like a world traveler, and his first book was a travel book. I have traveled a good deal in Concord, he explained. He also traveled a good deal in his mind, and in nature.

      Young Thoreau attended a public school, a private school, then Concord Academy, before Harvard, from which he graduated in 1837. According to legend, he refused to pick up his diploma because it was made of sheepskin. Let every sheep keep its skin, he said.

      Thoreau was a teacher for a brief stint at the Concord Academy, but left within a few weeks due to a dispute over corporal discipline, which he refused to administer. He then went into the family business – a pencil manufacturing factory – well known throughout the country for high quality pencils. But Henry could not be satisfied for long working in the family business, nor could his older brother John.

      Henry and John started their own school in Concord in 1838. But after John’s sudden death due to lockjaw in 1842, Henry closed the school and returned to work at the pencil factory.

      Ralph Waldo Emerson was the first to spot Thoreau’s genius. He offered Thoreau a job as a live-in handyman at the Emerson home. Already one of the most famous writers in America, Emerson was one of the founders of a movement later to be called Transcendentalism, which offered a romantic and spiritual view of nature. Emerson encouraged Thoreau to write for the Transcendental Journal, The Dial, which published some of his first poems and essays.

      In 1845 Emerson gave Thoreau permission to build a small cabin on a piece of land Emerson owned on the shore of Walden Pond. This experience inspired the book Walden. Thoreau began writing it in 1846 in response to questions from townspeople curious about his activities, and his notes and notebooks grew, through many rewrites and expansions, into the celebrated American classic.

      Thoreau lived for two years, two months and two days in his tiny cabin at Walden Pond. One night he was forced to spend in jail due to his refusal to pay a poll tax. Thoreau wrote about that experience in his essay ‘Resistance to Civil Government’ (later retitled ‘Civil Disobedience’), presenting a philosophy of non-cooperation with evil. The essay would subsequently inspire Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in starting their resistance movements.

      In 1849 Thoreau published his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, about a trip years earlier with his brother John. It sold poorly, making it harder for him to find a publisher for his masterpiece Walden. Finally in 1854 Walden was published by Ticknor and Fields, achieving some good reviews but only modest sales. The first printing of two thousand copies never sold out during the author’s lifetime. In the remaining eight years of his life Thoreau lived in rented rooms, earning only a minimal income, sometimes working in the pencil factory, sometimes surveying, occasionally lecturing, and publishing a few more essays.

      An outspoken abolitionist, Thoreau wrote eloquent attacks on the Fugitive Slave Law (Slavery in Massachusetts) and a strong defense of John Brown after the raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859. Soon after returning from a trip to Minnesota, Thoreau died in May, 1862, of the tuberculosis which had plagued him periodically since his youth. He was only forty-five years old.

      Neither a capitalist nor a socialist, sometimes called an anarchist, Thoreau popularized the famous quote: That government is best which governs least. His American dream of success was a modest one, yet he succeeded in his own terms. His income was always small; nor was he famous in his lifetime. He was more concerned with his daily afternoon walks in the Concord woods and writing in his private journal his thoughts and observations of nature. Emerson described him as a bachelor of thought and nature – though Thoreau saw himself in a more active role: Nature is my bride, he exulted in his journal.

      One of the most politically conscious men of the nineteenth century, Thoreau was a brilliant observer of social facts as well as natural facts. His outstanding prose style, sprinkled with proverbial gems, has won him a reputation as one of America’s leading literary figures. Walden is now considered one of the greatest books ever written by an American.

      In terms of quotability, Thoreau ranks very highly among American writers. Thoreau could pack as much into a sentence as any American writer, and sometimes he outshone everyone. With one famous quote he defined American individualism: If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. No less keen than his sharp observations of nature are his observations on human nature: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

      Thoreau could be funny, too. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

      His wit was often more savage than civilized. He was always on nature’s side -- a naturalist, a nature writer, nature lover, a champion of nature and wilderness and wildness everywhere. Thoreau urged us not to lose contact with the wildness of nature, nor the wildness in our own nature. In his posthumously published book Life Without Principle (1863) he prophesied: In wildness lies the preservation of the world.

      Thoreau can be seen in many lights – as a great American essayist – or the most eloquent of naturalists – or the original environmentalist – or a creative protestor – or the spokesperson for solitude – or a shining example of American independence and individuality. He accepted his own loneliness and explored it bravely, making his life an experiment in solitude and independent thinking. He walked his own talk and talked his own walk. In the future, when Nature is in fashion, Thoreau will be in fashion. When Nature is out of fashion, Thoreau will be out.

      If he did not quite succeed in making solitude chic, his posthumous popularity contributes to making solitude acceptable as an American lifestyle today. Recent census data shows an increasing number of Americans are living alone. Thoreau preached by example an important message – that it’s all right to be alone – I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time, he wrote. And he showed us the best way to be alone is to be alone with Nature.

      If great quotations are great thoughts, the thoughts of Thoreau are among the greatest.

      Alex Ayres

      A TO Z

      Glossary of Inspiring Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

      A

      ACTUAL

      A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

      A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849

      (see Appearances, Surface)

      ADAPT

      Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances.

      Walden, Economy

      (see Man)

      ADVANTAGE

      What you consider my disadvantage, I consider my advantage.

      Journal, Dec. 5, 1856

      ADVICE

      Simplify, simplify.

      Walden, "What I Lived

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