Historical photographic portraitBenjamin D. Maxham; restored reproduction · Public domain

427 collected words

Henry David Thoreau

Life dates: 1817 AD — 1862 AD

Writer and naturalist whose accounts of deliberate living and civic conscience invite close attention to circumstances. Supplied archive attributions retain their uncertainty; the linked Walden is a separate reading edition.

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Life and writing

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was a writer, thinker and naturalist associated with Concord, Massachusetts. He lived beside Walden Pond from 1845 to 1847, and Walden appeared in 1854. The interval between that experience and publication is a useful reminder that a written account is shaped through reflection, rather than being a transparent transcript of each day.

The linked edition contains Walden and a separate essay on civil disobedience. Walden’s chapters examine necessities, reading, observation and the purposes of daily life through a particular first-person experiment. Read a striking sentence alongside its chapter and the choices the speaker describes. An author profile and a related edition do not independently authenticate every contributor-supplied passage carrying Thoreau’s name.

Reading this voice

Start with Economy or Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, then ask what a claim means in that particular account of living. Notice the difference between considering one’s wants and dismissing another person’s unmet needs. The selected archive passages are supplied attributions and remain independently unverified, even where their themes invite comparison with Walden. Keep their original wording and undated coordinates distinct from the profile’s documented life years and the book’s publication history.

Subjects to explore

nature life contentment judgement

Words to begin with

Profile sources and editorial notes

Agent-assisted editorial profile, updated 2026-10-05. A human reviewer is not recorded. Biographical context does not independently authenticate every quotation attributed to this person.

Walden Woods Project — Thoreau’s Life, A Brief Chronology ↗
Limited original factual paraphrase for lifetime, Concord, pond residence and publication chronology; no article, portrait or manuscript reproduced. Checked 2026-10-05.
Project Gutenberg — Walden and Civil Disobedience, PG 205 ↗
Checked contents and chapter text support original reading guidance. Existing external US-specific edition; supplied archive attributions remain uncertain. Checked 2026-10-05.

Quotations and sayings

01c. 1839 AD

Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, or is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

02c. 1839 AD

It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience. But a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

03c. 1839 AD

Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death

Henry David Thoreau / quote

04c. 1839 AD

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

05c. 1839 AD

Life in us is like the water in a river.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

06c. 1839 AD

The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, - so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

07c. 1839 AD

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

08c. 1839 AD

Probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country. And as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worst, and not the better nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

09c. 1839 AD

I believe that, in this country, the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church did in its worst period. We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

10c. 1839 AD

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

11c. 1839 AD

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

12c. 1839 AD

The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires to-day. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

13c. 1839 AD

Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain-storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

14c. 1839 AD

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 do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

15c. 1839 AD

There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

16c. 1839 AD

No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

17c. 1839 AD

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intellegent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as his only AVAILABLE one, thus proving that he is himself AVAILABLE for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

18c. 1839 AD

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

19c. 1839 AD

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

20c. 1839 AD

If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man — and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages — it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

21c. 1839 AD

‎I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

22c. 1839 AD

Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

23c. 1839 AD

If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.

Henry David Thoreau / quote

24c. 1839 AD

There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, and not a grain more. ... A man sees only what concerns him.

Henry David Thoreau / quote