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“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.
In Walden, by "quiet desperation" Thoreau means the suffering of people who lead shallow, inauthentic lives dominated by competition for wealth, success, or the struggle...
Jun 20, 2018 · Thoreau's claim is simply false: the mass of people in the world do not lead a life of quiet desperation but, rather, of happiness. Moreover, there are methods that help many who live...
- The Desperate Treadmill of Desire
- The Art of Raising The Little Into The Large
- Use Your Senses to Discover Worlds Within Worlds
- Find Adventure in Your Backyard
- Make Smaller Symbolic Moves That Stand For Something Greater
- Conclusion
Thoreau’s famous quote — “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation” — is most frequently used as a reason for following one’s passion and achieving a life which avoids the mediocrity of playing it small and attains to extra-ordinary success. And indeed, another one of Thoreau’s most frequently quoted lines is this: Less quoted, however, is t...
The above is another of Thoreau’s most famous quotes. And another where the kernel of its meaning is often missed. To suck the marrow out of life often conjures up an image of outwardlyepic strivings — far-flung adventures and extravagant endeavors of great daring-do. Yet the marrow of a bone is what is within it — the life insidethe external struc...
Beginning from when he was in college, and continuing throughout his life, Thoreau required a long walk in nature each dayto maintain his physical and emotional equilibrium. While he often took these walks along familiar routes, they remained perennially fresh. Thoreau not only went out equipped, as Emerson notes, with “an old music book to press p...
While Thoreau celebrated the title of traveler, the journeys he had in mind had little to do with the covering of physical distance. Like another writer, J.R.R. Tolkien, Thoreau had scant desire for traditional, outward travel, because the richness of his inner life provided a landscape for inexhaustibly interesting explorations. The voyages of sel...
Thoreau’s adventures didn’t have to be grand to be satisfying because their power derived from their symbolicquality. They stood for something bigger and generated meaning over and beyond their actual parts. This was never as true as when it came to Thoreau’s stay at Walden. To us moderns, Thoreau’s sojourn along the shores of Walden pond seems lik...
Avoiding a life of quiet desperation doesn’t mean living exactly like Thoreau did. He not only worked in symbols, his whole life was a symbol — a typefrom which men can draw general lessons. The greatest of these lessons is to learn the art of raising the little into the large. That doesn’t necessarily mean giving up on big, outwardly-facing goals,...
- Brett And Kate Mckay
5 days ago · The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.
Jan 28, 2021 · The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.
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Apr 30, 2012 · The New York Times corrects a misquote of Thoreau’s “quiet desperation” line: An article last Sunday about Alan Z. Feuer, a New Yorker who reinvented himself and was often seen at society...
