Henry David Thoreau
American essayist and naturalist, 1817–1862. 2 explained quotes.
Thoreau explains why he moved to Walden Pond: to strip life down to its essentials and find out what it really has to teach, so that he would not reach death and discover he had not lived.
Read the full explanation →Thoreau argues that most people work themselves to exhaustion for things they don't need, and hide their despair behind ordinary routines. Walden is his experiment in living otherwise.
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About Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau, a friend and neighbor of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, Massachusetts, lived for two years in a small cabin he built by Walden Pond and wrote about it in Walden (1854).
His essay on civil disobedience, written after a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax, influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
More lines by Thoreau
Short quotes checked against their sources.
- “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”Walden, 1854
- “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”Walden, 1854