The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

The sentence comes from “Economy”, the long first chapter of Walden, in which Thoreau looks at the lives of his neighbours before explaining his own experiment. He has just described men driven by their work and by their own low opinion of themselves: the hardest master of all, he writes, is “when you are the slave-driver of yourself.” We fill our days with trifles, “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”

The line follows, and Thoreau hammers it home: “What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” Even games and amusements hide “a stereotyped but unconscious despair”. Yet he adds at once that “it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things”: his book offers a way out, by reducing one’s needs and living deliberately.

Thoreau lived by Walden Pond from 1845 to 1847 and published Walden in 1854. The line is among the most quoted in the book, often with an ending he never wrote, claiming that men go to the grave with the song still in them.

Walden; or, Life in the Woods, “Economy”, 1854

Checked word for word in the work itself.

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