Henry David Thoreau Quotes From Walden and Beyond

The best Thoreau quotes are sharper in context than on a mug. Below are fourteen lines from Walden, “Civil Disobedience” and “Walking”, each copied from the full text and cited to the chapter or essay, with a note on what Thoreau was arguing when he wrote it. Most of them turn out to be about money, clothes, furniture or the tax collector, and very few are about leaves.

Walden opens with the facts: he lived in a house he had built himself on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and I lived there two years and two months. The book is an account, in both senses.

Several of his famous lines on being alone and on reading are already on our pages of book quotes about solitude and quotes about reading, so none of those is repeated here.

Thoreau quotes from Economy, the first chapter of Walden

1. Quiet desperation

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Economy”

The first sentence is famous. The second is better, and almost nobody quotes it. Thoreau is not describing tragic lives here but ordinary, busy ones; the sentence just before is As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. The desperation is quiet because it looks like a normal week.

2. New clothes

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Economy”

A wonderful piece of practical advice hiding inside a sermon. He follows it with the plainest version: If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. Anyone who has bought the equipment for a hobby before trying the hobby will feel the point.

3. What a thing really costs

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, Walden, “Economy”

This is the idea the whole chapter is built on, and Thoreau immediately does the sums. An average house in the neighbourhood costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, he says, and saving that will take ten to fifteen years of a labourer’s life. “Economy” is the longest chapter in the book, and it is mostly accounting, down to the price of nails.

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

4. Rich in what you leave alone

a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”

The context is a fantasy of buying farms. Thoreau describes walking round the local properties, imagining where the orchard would go, and then letting the land lie fallow in his head. He even had the refusal of several farms, and adds that the refusal was all I wanted. It is a joke at his own expense, and a real philosophy of ownership.

5. Living deliberately

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.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”

The most quoted sentence in the book, and a fair statement of method: the move to the pond was an experiment, not a retreat. Read on and the tone gets fiercer. He wants to suck out all the marrow of life, which is not a phrase from a man looking for peace and quiet.

6. Simplify, simplify

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”

The famous slogan comes a few lines later. What is easy to miss is the comedy: the ten toes are allowed only in extreme cases. He says it three times, Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!, and then once more, Simplify, simplify. Five repetitions in a passage about cutting things down.

Visitors and The Ponds

7. Three chairs

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Visitors”

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A corrective for anyone who imagines Thoreau as a hermit. The chapter opens with him saying he loves society as much as most, and that he is naturally no hermit. When larger groups came, there was only the third chair for all of them, and they economised the room by standing up. He claims to have had twenty-five or thirty souls under his roof at once.

8. Earth’s eye

A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “The Ponds”

Thoreau follows the metaphor all the way: the trees by the shore are the eye’s slender eyelashes, the wooded hills its overhanging brows. He was not only a dreamer about the water, though: in “The Pond in Winter” he sounds the bottom through the ice with a cod-line and a stone. For more water in books, there is book quotes about the sea.

Thoreau quotes from the Conclusion of Walden

9. Why he left

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Conclusion”

The experiment ends without a conversion. What follows is a warning about habit: within a week, his feet had worn a path from his door to the pond-side, and years later it was still distinct. If one cabin can wear a rut that fast, he asks, how deep are the ruts of tradition and conformity?

10. A different drummer

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Conclusion”

The line is usually quoted as permission to be eccentric. The sentence just before it is about speed, not style: Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed. And the one after it is about patience: a man need not mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak.

Civil Disobedience and Walking

11. The government that governs not at all

Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—”That government is best which governs not at all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

Henry David Thoreau, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”, opening paragraph

He begins by heartily accepting the motto that the best government governs least, then pushes it to its end. The condition matters: when men are prepared for it. The Gutenberg text dates the essay to 1849 and gives its original title, Resistance to Civil Government.

12. The true place for a just man

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

Henry David Thoreau, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”

He had tested it on himself. Later in the essay he says plainly that he had paid no poll-tax for six years and was put into a jail once on this account, for one night. What struck him in the cell was the foolishness of an institution that treated him as if he were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.

13. Sauntering

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering

Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”

He then offers an etymology, deriving saunterer from pilgrims bound for the Holy Land, la Sainte Terre, and an alternative from sans terre, without land or home. He admits he prefers the first, which is a nice confession: he picked the derivation he liked best.

14. Wildness

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.

Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”

Usually shortened to the last clause, and worth reading with the capital letter intact: Thoreau writes “Wildness”, not “wilderness”, and the essay treats it as a quality that people and trees can have as well as a direction on the map. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild, he goes on.

Quick reference

Thoreau is also good on clocks and hours; his line about time as a stream he goes fishing in is on our page of book quotes about time. And if you read the “Economy” chapter, look for the table of his building costs: he lists the boards, the nails, the chalk and the latch, and totals the house at twenty-eight dollars, twelve and a half cents.

Sources

• Henry David Thoreau, Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, Project Gutenberg #205
• Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, Project Gutenberg #71
• Henry David Thoreau, Walking, Project Gutenberg #1022