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The Price of Anything is the Amount of Life You Exchange For It.
6 Quotes From Henry Thoreau That Will Change Your Life
It might sound like a quote from Tim Denning, but the title of this post is actually from 19th-century naturalist, writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau.
It’s almost 30 years since I read Thoreau’s classic, Walden, about the two years he spent living alone in a cabin deep in the wood of Massachusetts, a book in which he shared many of his musings and philosophies from that time. The book made a big impression on me back when I first read it and many of his writings are still as relevant today as when they were written over a century and a half ago.
Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist, openly opposing the slave trade. Many of his political ideas were radically anarchistic in nature and his philosophy of civil disobedience influenced such political giants as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.
He had a profound love of solitude, wilderness and nature as well as a deep reverence for life in all its forms. Many of his ideas were way ahead of their time and can still teach us so much today about our relationship with the world, with all its other inhabitants and, perhaps especially, with ourselves.