Henry Thoreau Quotes

“Best of all was Henry James, Sr., then also thirty-two, with a son William just over a year old and another, the future novelist, Henry, just born in April. James had not yet undergone his conversion to Swedenborgianism or to living in Europe, but was already a gently persistent seeker. “I know of no one so patient and determined to have the good of you,” Thoreau wrote of him after a three-hour talk. “He is a refreshing forward-looking and forward-moving man, and he naturalized and humanized New York for me.”3 These men were all just slightly older than Thoreau. All were successful: James had family money, the others were writing with energy and publishing to general acclaim.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“He did not see this as an exclusively religious matter, certainly not just a Christian one, nor did he think of it as essentially a social matter. Nevertheless he was drawing on several long traditions of reformational zeal. One certainly was Protestant. Thoreau’s ultimate reformed community of one at Walden would be an example of the extreme results of the tendency of Protestants to splinter away from any parent body. Thoreau’s interest in individual reformation also led him back to the Greek ethical schools, and particularly to Stoicism—the search for self-rule or autarky—and the same interest should also be seen as a practical consequence of a serious immersion in the new, Kantian, subjectivism. All three impulses, Protestant, Stoic, and Kantian, lay behind and fed into the increasingly clear logic of his own personal life, his search for personal reformation, the discovery and fulfillment of his own destiny as an autonomous individual.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“Observing that since the War of 1812, “the line of socialist excitements lies parallel with the line of religious Revivals,” Noyes cites the early-nineteenth-century division of Puritan Congregationalism into orthodoxy and Unitarianism; the first party, he says, “was set to defend religion, the other liberty.” Orthodoxy, he goes on, “had for its function the carrying through of the Revival system; the other the development of Socialism.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“On the twenty-sixth of April, Thoreau solved for the time being his problem of where to live, if not the problem of what to live for, by moving into Emerson’s house. The arrangement turned out to be a good one and it would last for two years, a sojourn almost equal in length to his later stay at Walden Pond. Thoreau”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“Discontent with industrialism was already strong on both sides of the Atlantic. Marx and Engels would soon be heard from. The American phenomenon, not even approached in Europe, of more than forty model communities founded during the 1840s alone, was very much part of the times. The impulse to create communities was linked with the cause of nonviolence; most of the founders were more interested in building models, which would be emulated because they succeeded, than in the destruction of the existing order. Still, American utopian socialism had much in common with the spirit of 1848.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“talk that Alcott might come to live with them.2”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“However much this transcendental aesthetic pointed to the primacy of mind over both things and words, Thoreau”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“But their ideas threatened institutions such as State Street, Harvard College, and the Unitarian Establishment, and the transcendentalists were, singly and as a group, more radical and more socially and politically activist than such writers as Poe, Hawthorne, or Melville, who held older, darker views of man and nature. Most of the transcendentalists found that the ethical consequences of transcendental idealism impelled them into social, political, and intellectual reform.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“The American idealists did not, singly or in a group, make a perceptible contribution to the development of German idealism. They pioneered no advance in metaphysics or epistemology. Insofar as the technical problem of knowledge concerned them, it was as it affected language and the communication of knowledge, and the New England group was a fertile one in ideas about the symbolic aspects of language. But their overriding interest was in the ethical implications of the new subjectivism. In ways that prefigure William James and pragmatism, they asked what the practical implications of the new ideas were for life and writing. Thus the great—and to a large extent still unrecognized—achievement of the transcendentalists as a group, and Parker and Ripley, Fuller and Peabody, Emerson and Thoreau in particular, was in working out the ethical implications of transcendentalism and making them widely accessible and, above all, liveable.3”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“thought.” Emerson himself gave the most lucid account in an 1842 address: It is well known to most of my audience that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant of Konigsburg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired: that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man’s thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent, that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought is popularly called at the present day Transcendental.2”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“Emersonian individualism is neither antisocial nor imperial; it does not advocate withdrawal from society, nor does it seek to rule others. It is overwhelmingly concerned with the self-education and development of the individual, and convinced that there can be neither love nor society unless one first has a group of autonomous individuals. Emersonian self-reliance is, like the Stoic’s self-respect, the necessary means to self-culture, to the development of the self. Insofar as it is a means to power it is only power over the self, not over others.7”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“Although not so much influenced, he said, by the German concept of Kultur (public, “official” culture: plays, operas, cultural institutions and events), the idea of individual culture struck a deeply responsive chord in Emerson, and his study of Goethean and Herderian ideas of self-culture led Emerson to his 1837—38 lecture series called “Human Culture.” Testimony to the importance he gave the subject is his catechistic note to himself in 1837: “What is culture? the chief end of man.”6”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“August on “Self-Command.” In September of 1830 his topic was “Self-Culture,” in December “Trust Yourself.” In July of 1831 he talked on “Limits of Self-Reliance,” and in the following February on “Self-Improvement,” a favorite sermon he was to repeat fourteen times over the next four years.5”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“But it is principally in Emerson’s writings that the German concept of self-culture was taken over and reworked into the still-familiar American emphasis on self-reliance and self-improvement. Emerson had, in fact, been writing on the subject since at least 1828, long before his serious encounter with Goethe, and in the titles of some of his early sermons we can see how deeply he was interested in the problem of self-development.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“things of the mind  .  .  .  given to autobiographical confession and deeply personal.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“Arnold’s normative public concept of culture as “the best that has been thought and said,” and from the anthropological use of the word culture to mean the habits and customs of any distinct social or ethnic group. The essentially individualistic inwardness of personal culture may owe something to the eighteenth-century revival of Stoic thought. As a recent commentator notes, “The notion of stoical self-respect, of inner freedom, the ‘No man need say “I must”’ of Lessing, was of course one of the central ideas of the German Enlightenment.”1”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“Concord—was to America what Goethe’s Weimar had been to Germany. In each case, a small if not humble society came to have enormous moral and intellectual importance for a country, coming eventually to symbolize the best of the national culture. And both Concord and Weimar owed that central and symbolic importance to their productive interest in what John Stuart Mill called “the culture of the inward man.” Concord was acutely aware that it was following Weimar in this interest; nothing Emerson and his friends took from Goethe’s Germany was more important than the concept of Bildung.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“Thoreau’s earliest poems reflect the very different kinds of verse he admired at the time. In some early efforts he worked to make phrases about Musketaquid, the Indian name for Concord River.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“United States and the defense of the American Indians. Thoreau himself became an active and early supporter of John Brown, and even Emerson was far warmer and more active in the antislavery movement than most of those who mocked transcendentalists for having their heads in the clouds. If indeed they did, the clouds were more apt to be storm clouds of revolt than wisps of antisocial daydreaming.4”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“was characteristic of these Americans to urge individualism as the best means of social reform, and not just as self-aggrandizement or a narrow self-culture. In this they differed from the Germans, whose Bildung was a self-justifying concept of self-culture which Thomas Mann has complained led Germans who espoused it away from, rather than toward, political or social action. It”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“By March he was reading—or at least recalling—Mme de Stael’s Germany (1812), that widely read introduction to German thought and culture. Mme de Stael ends her book with three strong chapters on “enthusiasm” which, she said, was the leading, all-important characteristic of the Germans. It was, in her view, the one indispensable key to the subject. What the Germans had taught her, they also taught Thoreau: “Thought is nothing without enthusiasm.”8”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“the ideas of evolution and natural selection became our catchall explanation of natural change—and our all-but-universal and therefore invisible metaphor for social change—the Romantic generation, from Goethe to Whitman, expressed its conception of the role of change in nature, quite detached from any notion of progress, in the idea of metamorphosis.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“kind of sketching with words.4 It is not quite accurate to say flatly that Goethe influenced Thoreau; no one more resisted influence in the usual sense. But, like Emerson, Goethe showed Thoreau the path to his own work. Reading Goethe’s account of his Italian trip made Thoreau all the more eager to start on his own travels and to be about his own work.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“Emerson and the circle of liberal intellectuals around him, Kant and Fichte were simply more important than Locke or Hume or the Scottish Common Sense school in philosophy; Goethe and Novalis were more important than Wordsworth or Keats in literature, and the work of Herder, Coleridge (himself strongly influenced by German thought), and Schleiermacher was more important in theology than Jonathan Edwards and the American Puritan tradition. One simply could not expect, in 1837, to understand the advanced intellectual atmosphere of the times without taking up Germany.1”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“In his most eloquent and moving tribute to the classics, the chapter on “Reading” in Walden, he tried again to explain: The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. If we can see as much and as well as they saw, we can also hope to write as well as they wrote. If, as Thoreau notes in his journal in mid-February of 1838, each of the sons of Greece “created a new heaven and a new earth for Greece,” there was no compelling reason why each of the sons and daughters of Concord should not be able to do the same.4”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“Emerson’s leading idea about history is that there is one mind, of which history is the record. Another way to put it is to say that human nature—the human mind—is and has been essentially the same in all ages and places. There are variations, of course, sometimes important and even blinding differences. But the similarities between people, even those of widely different times and places, far outweigh, in importance, the differences. If the human mind has always been essentially the same, then it has neither progressed nor declined from age to age. Chronology, therefore, is not what is important in history. All ages are equal; the world exists for the writer today just as much as it did for Homer. This way of looking at history, which sets the present as high as any past era, is a direct response to what W. J. Bate has so brilliantly described as the burden of the past, it is the basis for most of Emerson’s best work from 1835 to 1850, and it quickly became a deep and permanent conviction—and a liberating, enabling conviction for Henry Thoreau. In October of 1837, evidently at Emerson’s urging, he began to keep the journal that would be his own history, and by the third week in November he was telling himself to read Virgil to be reminded of the essential uniformity of human nature, past and present, Roman and American.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“man could base a good life, a just life, on nature.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“a paying career out of her writing. She and Emerson talked about many things, including self-reliance, but most concentratedly about German literature. She, as well as Carlyle, was now absorbed in Goethe’s writings and was working on a translation of Eckermann’s great Conversations with Goethe. Emerson was working on his (German, increasingly convinced, as were other friends such as Hedge from Bangor, and Parker and Ripley from Boston, that the most interesting intellectual and artistic currents, the really vital ideas seemed recently to have been coming out of Germany. No one, they thought, would be able to understand the nineteenth century without taking Kant, Herder, Hegel, and Goethe into account. Until one had read them, one’s basic education was not complete.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“with duckweed, looking like green confetti. Early settlers had found Concord damp, poor, low, and mean; it was, they complained, unusually subject to storms and full of swamps and impenetrable undergrowth. All that had changed by 1837. There were still extensive lowlands and swamps, but Concord on the whole was a healthy place. Surrounded by open land, it was drier than it is now, and it seems to have been relatively free of insects. Life expectancy was around forty, but almost one person in four lived until seventy. One out of every five died from fevers of various sorts, while one out of every seven deaths was from “consumption.” The disease was endemic in many families, including Thoreau’s.5”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

“The Concord to which Henry Thoreau returned in 1837 has been called a village, but it was really a good-sized town of two thousand inhabitants lying sixteen miles, or four hours by stage, west of Boston.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind