Henry David Thoreau on Creating a Deep Mental Path

"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."

-- Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau's Biography

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 in Massachusetts, USA. A graduate from Harvard, Thoreau was a prolific writer who left behind a vast body of work from poetry to philosophy, from transcendentalism to history, from resistance against unjust states to abolitionism, compiling in over 20 volumes of work. Thoreau invested in a philosophy of life and praxis as opposed to a way of thinking and writing, he was a thinker that thought in terms of nature and the human condition. He was a very well read thinker with an excellent knowledge base from ancient Greek thought, passing through Asian traditions, and the western philosophy of his time. He is most famous for his literary work Walden and for his political work Civil Disobedience, although he also greatly contributed to the philosophy of science.

Thoreau had a long term relation with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom he saw as a guide and a friend and with whom he constantly argued due to their different philosophical and personal positions. In his early works he followed Transcendentalism, the philosophy, supported by Ralph Waldo Emerson, based on the idea that the individual spirit transcends the material. He was also one of the first supporters of the evolution theory from Charles Darwin. During his life time, Thoreau only published two works, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and Walden, neither of which gave him any sort of income. Thoreau also worked in his family's pencil factory and as a land surveyor for most of his adult life. He died at the age of 44 after almost thirty years struggling with tuberculosis, and is buried in Concord, Massachusetts. His work has inspired thinkers well beyond his time, specially in the field of ecology, phenomenology, and radical political thought. After Thoreau's death, many groups were founded in his honour most notably The Walden Woods Project and The Thoreau Society.

(Sourced from The European Graduate School)

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