Quotes About Thoreau

mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.

Thoreau was an idiot.

Robert T. Richardson, Jr. Henry Thoreau, A Life of the Mind. University of California Press: Berkeley, 1986

maybe his libido was submerged in some sort of polymorphous love of nature, as some biographers have theorized about Thoreau.

I told of Henry David Thoreau's decision to break the law in protest against our invasion of Mexico in 1846, and began to give a brief history of civil disobedience in the United States.

A land ethic for tomorrow should be as honest as Thoreau's Walden, and as comprehensive as the sensitive science of ecology. It should stress the oneness of our resources and the live-and-help-live logic of the great chain of life. If, in our haste to "progress," the economics of ecology are disregarded by citizens and policy makers alike, the result will be an ugly America.

It's now possible to completely banish solitude from your life. Thoreau and Storr worried about people enjoying less solitude. We must now wonder if people might forget this state of being altogether.

This magician's trick of shifting the units of measure from money to time is the core novelty of what the philosopher Frédéric Gros calls Thoreau's "new economics," a theory that builds on the following axiom, which Thoreau establishes early in Walden: "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.

Do what Thoreau did, which is learn to have a little disconnectedness within the connected world—don't run away.

Over a hundred years earlier, Thoreau demonstrated similar concern, famously writing in Walden that "we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

First Facebook, then the iPhone: compulsive communicating and connecting—supported by mysterious, almost magical innovations in radio modulation and fiber-optic routing—swept our culture before anyone had the presence of mind to step back and re-ask Thoreau's fundamental question: To what end?

Thoreau's new economics was developed in an industrial age, but his basic insights apply just as well to our current digital context.

The striking thing with Thoreau is not the actual content of the argument. After all, sages in earliest Antiquity had already proclaimed their contempt for possessions ... What impresses is the form of the argument. For Thoreau's obsession with calculation runs deep ... He says: keep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain, or lose?

The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses.

As long as I have the friendship of the sesasons life will never be a burden to me.

There was a distinct class of these gentlemen tramps, young men no longer young, who wouldn't settle down, who disliked polite society and the genteel conventions, but hadn't enough intelligence or enough conceit to think themselves transcendentalists or poets, in the style of Thoreau or of Walt Whitman.

You cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that which shocks you.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots.

If Thoreau were alive today he would have full confirmation of his fears. Instant information is instantly obsolete. Only the most banal ideas can successfully cross great distances at the speed of light. And anything that travels very far very fast is scarcely worth transporting, especially the tourist.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?

Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can't get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head.