Thumbing Through Thoreau: A Book of Quotations by Henry David Thoreau

ABOUT Kenny Luck

Kenny Luck
Kenny Luck is a graduate student at Marywood University in Scranton, Pa., and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in History and Political Science from the same institution. He writes for The Weekender – an arts and entertainment weekly – and The Independent. He is currently working on his s More...

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Description

On July 4, 1845, when Henry David Thoreau moved into his cabin on the shores of Walden Pond, he was probably unaware that his abode in the woods, and the impact and influence of that endeavor, would forever echo through time.

Thoreau was an uncompromising idealist; an ardent maverick who criticized his fellow man. He urged that men and women ought to live more simply, and more deliberately. “The mass of men,” he famously wrote, “lead lives of quite desperation.”

Yet the scope of Thoreau’s message is much wider than social criticism. He speaks of spiritual transcendence in Nature and the unbounded potential of the individual. Thoreau is a dreamer and he speaks to dreamers. In a word, shun dogmatism and demagoguery; see beyond the immediate conventional religious explanations to reap a higher understanding.

In our commodified contemporary American society, with the rise of religious intolerance and fundamentalism, materialism and mass consumerism, Thoreau’s message is needed now more than ever.

Author Kenny Luck has thumbed through Thoreau’s voluminous journals, correspondences and other publications to make this the most comprehensive collection of Thoreau aphorisms available.

Illustrators Jay Luke and Ren Adams lend their talents to artistically interpret Thoreau's vision. Each quote is accompanied by an original drawing.

A collaboration of three individuals breathes new life into the immortal words of Henry David Thoreau.

"As a historian who has made the study of Henry Thoreau my main interest for almost 15 years, I have always found his writings to be very "modern." This book of Thoreau's quotations, all of which were written 150 years ago, are indeed very timely for today's modern, over-worked, overstressed and over-materialistic world. Thoreau's ideas about the search for a simpler way of life ring truer now then they did in the nineteenth century!" - Richard Smith, The Thoreau Society, Historian, Concord, MA, MeetHenryDavidThoreau.com