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.
Henry David Thoreau
Castles In the Air
Topic: Creativity, Culture, & the Arts
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that 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. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. 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.“
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience," an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.
Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism.
He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Walden
Thoreau, Henry David. “Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience.” Gutenberg, pp. 323-24 [Henry David Thoreau, Walden].
Henry David Thoreau
Resources
Copyright © 2017 – 2025 LuminaryQuotes.com About Us
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Reflections on Walden by Elizabeth Witherell [Excerpt]
In late March 1845 Thoreau went to Walden Pond, a sixty-two acre body of water a few miles from his parents’ home in Concord, Massachusetts, and selected a spot to build a house. The site he picked was on land belonging to his close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson; he and Emerson had already discussed Thoreau’s plan to live on the land which Emerson had recently purchased. By July 4 of that same year, the house was substantially complete and Thoreau moved to the pond. The experiment had begun.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” (Walden, 90)
In 1966, a project to edit and publish all of Thoreau’s writings was undertaken by a group of scholars under the sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities . Under the editorship of Walter Harding (1966-1972), William L. Howarth (1973-1979), and Elizabeth Witherell (1980-present), the project, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, has published fourteen of its projected thirty-volume series with Princeton University Press. The Princeton Edition of Walden was published in 1971.
–Elizabeth Witherell, with Elizabeth Dubrulle [Reflections on Walden, Thoreau Library, UCSB].
Paulo Coelho
Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau; July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher (and I must add, his book on Civil Disobedience (1849) was one of the major influences in my life).
Saint Augustine says : an unjust law should not be considered as a law. We equally see throughout history that many people rebelled against the system because they considered it unjust: Gandhi, Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Simon Bolivar. On the other hand a society needs laws in order to function – or else anarchy will rule….
–Paulo Coelho [Thoreau and dreams (September 27, 2012)].
Additional Henry David Thoreau Quotes
“No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.”
–Henry David Thoreau [Walden].
“Public opinion is but a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”
–Henry David Thoreau [Walden] P. 3.