The language of friendship is not words but meanings
Source: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)
Author
American · 1817-1862 · 27 quotes
American · 1817–1862
27 quotes in our collection
Henry David Thoreau was the American essayist and poet who spent two years in a cabin at Walden Pond in the 1840s and turned the experiment into one of the most influential works of American prose. Born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817, he was a student of Emerson and a practitioner of a more demanding Transcendentalism — one that required testing ideas against actual living rather than merely writing about them. Walden records not only the economics of simple life but its interior weather: the shifting light, the ice on the pond, the particular quality of attention that solitude cultivates. His essay Civil Disobedience, written in response to his arrest for refusing to pay taxes that supported slavery, gave Gandhi and King their strategy for the twentieth century. The question is not what you look at, he wrote, but what you see — a distinction that governed everything he did.
Common Themes
Collected Quotes
The language of friendship is not words but meanings
Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake
It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it
Every child begins the world again
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new