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Famous Quotes | Our inventions are wont to be...

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. - Henry David Thoreau Attribution: Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. Walden (1854), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 2, pp. 57-58, Houghton Mifflin (1906).

Categories: Author, Inventions, Naturalist, New York City, Philosopher, Progress

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Henry David Thoreau

Titles by Henry David Thoreau:

• Civil Disobedience
• Transcendentalism
• Walden

Salem on History:

• Henry David Thoreau

eNotes:

• Henry David Thoreau (The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail)
• Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts (Transcendentalism)
• Henry David Thoreau (Walden)

Encyclopedia:

• Thoreau, Henry David (West's Encyclopedia of American Law)
• Thoreau, Henry David (The Oxford Companion to American Literature)
• Thoreau, Henry David (The Oxford Companion to English Literature)
• Thoreau, Henry David (The Oxford Companion to American Military History)

Primary Sources:

• John Brown and Henry David Thoreau (Terrorism Reference)

Salem on Literature:

• The Essays of Henry David Thoreau (Masterplots, Definitive Revised Edition)
• Henry David Thoreau (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)

Literary Criticism:

• A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Henry David Thoreau (Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism)
• Walden; or, Life in the Woods Henry David Thoreau (Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism)
• Thoreau, Henry David (Poetry Criticism)

Calendar of Literary Facts:

• Henry David Thoreau is born
• Henry David Thoreau establishes residence at a cabin on Walden Pond, outside Concord, Massachusetts
• Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden; or, Life in the Woods
• Henry David Thoreau dies