Henry David Thoreau
1817–1862 · United States
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Henry David Thoreau
Drew From(5)
who shaped Henry David Thoreau
- Walden is Emerson's transcendentalism stepped down from the lectern into a one-room cabin
- The self-reliance Emerson preached and the divinity he found in nature are exactly what Thoreau set out to live for two years
- Read the essays first and Walden reads as their proof — the idea tested against woodsmoke, ice, and a bean field
- The philosophy Thoreau says he bathed his intellect in every morning at the pond
- Walden quotes it by name and praises it again in the "Economy" chapter — Thoreau kept it as a constant companion in the woods
- Read the Gita first and you hear its call to inward discipline and detachment running under Thoreau's whole experiment, mingling its Ganges with his pond water
- The Iliad sits at the heart of Walden's chapter on reading — Thoreau's case for meeting the great books in their original Greek
- He alludes to Homer throughout: an "Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings," Achilles and Patroclus surfacing in the bean-field
- Walking into Homer's epic first shows you what Thoreau wanted from a book — something worth the labor of the original
via The Analects
- One of the Eastern voices threaded through Walden — Thoreau quotes the Analects and its sister classics ten times, in his own renderings
- Confucius's lines on true knowledge and on virtue swaying men like grass before the wind sit alongside Thoreau's own deliberate living
- He'd steeped himself in the Analects a decade earlier, editing forty-plus Confucian passages for The Dial; reading it first reveals which of Walden's aphorisms are Confucian in origin
- Walden lifts Ecclesiastes 9:4 — "a living dog is better than a dead lion" — to insist the living present outweighs any dead, venerated past
- Thoreau was "not inclined to quote the Old Testament," leaning on Hindu and Persian sources instead, so the borrowing is scattered and incidental rather than a backbone
- A single sharp allusion, worth knowing for the way Thoreau bends scripture to his own argument
Portraits
A cleaned, deskewed restoration of the same 1856 Maxham daguerreotype — the clearest high-contrast version of the definitive Thoreau portrait, good for crisp reproduction.
Benjamin D. Maxham, 1856
Soft crayon-and-graphite portrait of a clean-shaven young Thoreau in profile, made the year Walden was published.
Samuel Worcester Rowse, 1854
Famous Quotes
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.”
“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.”
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears 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.”
About Henry David Thoreau
American essayist, poet, and philosopher, best known for Walden, his account of two years spent living simply in a cabin near Walden Pond. A protégé of Emerson and a key transcendentalist, his essay 'Civil Disobedience' influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. He was also a meticulous naturalist and early environmentalist.