How to See Life from the View of a True Environmentalist
The great mind of an early Harvard Grad
Graduating from Harvard at 20 years old in 1837, he was an American essayist, philosopher, author, poet, and leading transcendentalist. Today, he is best known for his book Walden; or Life In The Woods, published in 1854. This book came out of his experience of immersing himself in nature for more than two years in a small house he built on Walden Pond.
His writings on government were revolutionary at the time as can be seen in his essay titled Civil Disobedience, published in 1849. To this day he is considered a visionary environmentalist with many considering him a father of the environmental movement.
Born Henry David Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817, he contracted tuberculosis in 1835, suffering from it off and on, dying at the young age of 44 in 1862. Thoreau was an interesting, intelligent, and complex individual. Whether you agree with his politics or not, you will find great wisdom in his words. I have grouped a sampling of Thoreau’s quotes by subject for easy reference.
Life
“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.”
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
“Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”
“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 he hears, however measured or far away.”
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“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”
“Most of the luxuries and many so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”
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“Surely joy is the condition of life.”
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.”
“Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”
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“Our life is frittered away by detail…simplify, simplify.”
“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.”
Living
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
“What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.”
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
Seeing
“Only that traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.”
“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”
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“Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.”
“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”
“The language of friendship is not words but meanings.”
“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
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“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.”
“The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.”
“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
Dreams
“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.”
“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”
Becoming
“For an impenetrable shield, stand inside yourself.”
“Be yourself, not your idea of what you think somebody else’s idea of yourself should be.”
“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
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“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…”
“The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”
“When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.”
Seeking
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them”
“Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you. But if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.”
“Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.”
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“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.”
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”
Reality
“Not all who wander are lost.”
“Men are born to succeed, not to fail.”
“Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.”
“It is never too late to give up our prejudices.”
“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity”
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“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”
“It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise”
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“Things do not change; we change.”
“If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”
Nature
“It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.”
“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
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“All good things are wild and free.”
“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?”
“The universe is wider than our views of it.”
I hope you find as much inspiration from Thoreau as so many others have. I leave you with the challenge from this final Thoreau quote:
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.”
Bill Abbate Leadership Writer and Editor in ILLUMINATION.
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