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On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

Henry David Thoreau/1849 / 19th century
ConscienceIndividual ResponsibilityJusticeLaw And Government

Essay in the Transcendentalism tradition, oriented around conscience and individual responsibility.

Thoreau's On the Duty of Civil Disobedience argues that conscience can require principled refusal when law protects injustice. Written out of resistance to slavery, war, and passive citizenship, the essay joins Transcendentalist individualism to a lasting theory of moral dissent against the state.

651 excerpts/19 sections
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Chapters

The structural skeleton of the work

Section 2

Walden: Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

52 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Simplicity10 excerptsNature7 excerptsPerception7 excerptsReality7 excerptsAwakening5 excerpts

Living Deliberately

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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Section 3

Walden: Reading

33 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Reading8 excerptsEducation6 excerptsLanguage5 excerptsWisdom5 excerptsClassics4 excerpts

Timeless Veil Lifted

The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.

Section 4

Walden: Sounds

28 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Nature8 excerptsSimplicity5 excerptsFate4 excerptsContemplation3 excerptsMusic3 excerpts

Direct Experience

But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?

Section 5

Walden: Solitude

33 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Solitude12 excerptsNature11 excerptsHealth4 excerptsSociety4 excerptsSimplicity3 excerpts

Driftwood vs Indra

With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the drift-wood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it.

Section 7

Walden: The Bean-Field

21 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Nature9 excerptsLabor5 excerptsHumility2 excerptsHusbandry2 excerptsInterconnectedness2 excerpts

Impartial Sun

We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity.

Section 8

Walden: The Village

6 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Adventure1 excerptCommunity Structure1 excerptContentment1 excerptEmbodiment1 excerptExperience1 excerpt

Automatic Walk

Sometimes, after coming home thus late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my eyes could not see, dreaming and absent-minded all the way, until I was aroused by having to raise my hand to lift the latch, I have not been able to recall a single step of my walk, and I have thought that perhaps my body would find its way home if its master should forsake it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth without assistance.

Section 9

Walden: The Ponds

29 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Nature19 excerptsPerception7 excerptsBeauty4 excerptsPurity4 excerptsPermanence3 excerpts

Indestructible Mirror

Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh;—a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun's hazy brush,—this the light dust-cloth,—which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.

Section 10

Walden: Baker Farm

6 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Nature3 excerptsAdventure2 excerptsFreedom2 excerptsAnti-Materialism1 excerptCritique Of Consumerism1 excerpt

Rainbow Over Shoulder

As I was leaving the Irishman's roof after the rain, bending my steps again to the pond, my haste to catch pickerel, wading in retired meadows, in sloughs and bog-holes, in forlorn and savage places, appeared for an instant trivial to me who had been sent to school and college; but as I ran down the hill toward the reddening west, with the rainbow over my shoulder, and some faint tinkling sounds borne to my ear through the cleansed air, from I know not what quarter, my Good Genius seemed to say,—Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day,—farther and wider,—and rest thee by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played.

Section 11

Walden: Higher Laws

32 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Nature5 excerptsDiet3 excerptsHunting3 excerptsHypocrisy3 excerptsMorality3 excerpts

Savage vs Spiritual

As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.

Section 12

Walden: Brute Neighbors

9 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Nature4 excerptsAnimals1 excerptAnthropomorphism1 excerptArt1 excerptChoice1 excerpt

Serene Innocent Eyes

The remarkably adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes is very memorable. All intelligence seems reflected in them. They suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience. Such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coeval with the sky it reflects. The woods do not yield another such a gem.

Section 13

Walden: House-Warming

18 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Simplicity5 excerptsArchitecture2 excerptsHospitality2 excerptsNature2 excerptsAction Vs Words1 excerpt

Hospitality as Distance

A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there,—in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance.

Section 14

Walden: Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors

17 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Nature7 excerptsMemory3 excerptsEndurance2 excerptsFaith2 excerptsFriendship2 excerpts

Air Castles

We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which float through the western sky, and the mother-o’-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and building castles in the air for which earth offered no worthy foundation.

Section 17

Walden: Spring

28 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Nature15 excerptsInnocence4 excerptsRenewal4 excerptsSpring4 excerptsCreativity2 excerpts

Living Earth Poetry

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.

Section 19

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

64 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Civil Disobedience15 excerptsGovernment15 excerptsConscience6 excerptsFreedom6 excerptsIndividualism4 excerpts

Get Off Shoulders

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.