Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

The line comes in the “Conclusion” of Walden, where Thoreau urges his readers to build on solid ground. He tells of a traveller who asked a boy whether a swamp had a hard bottom; the boy said yes, the horse sank in up to the girths, and the boy explained: “you have not got half way to it yet.” He asks for work done thoroughly, like a nail driven home and clinched. Just after the line, he recalls a dinner rich in food, wine and obsequious service, where “sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry”.

Thoreau lived by Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, from 1845 to 1847, and reworked his account for years before publishing it in 1854. The last chapter gathers his lessons, including the famous man who “hears a different drummer”.

Truth here is less an abstract idea than a way of living: sincerity, and the hard bottom of reality beneath the “bogs and quicksands of society”.

Walden, Conclusion, 1854

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work