#JohnWick_77_Challenge #10: Quotes in Context: Thoreau (Walden)
When/Where started: FEB 2019 — Manila
Not sure about your experience, but over the last few years as I read bogs, tweets and watched Youtube, I was beginning to see a rather disturbing trend. An inordinate number of people are using quotes to prove a point that were either completely out of context or attributed to the wrong source
So I decided to publish a few blogs called ‘quotes in context’. In early 2019 one quote that was making the rounds (that had raised some red flags for me) was from WALDEN. Thus the first one was the Thoreau quote that you see here.
“…that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. “
This of course meant I had to go back through Walden to get a full understanding of the whole thing (again) so that I could put this quote into context and then try and interpret it (from my perspective) for the 21st century.
One of my opening lines from that blog was, “But how many of you know where this actually comes from? It is the last chapter of the classic, Walden. (public domain audiobook here)”
Thoreau’s Walden ‘experiment’ “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently …” was Thoreau’s full-on ‘life hack’. He literally unplugged from city life on July 4, 1845. This REALLY resonated with me in early 2019 as I had done something similar…twice. Once after a year in KSA and again after some time in Beijing. ThoughI have yet to create my Walden, I did make some massive strides in my creative endeavours both times.
ACTION POINT: What action do you take when you see a quote taken out of context?
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