Gandhi quote on Henry David Thoreau

Be resolutely and faithfully who you are – Thoreau

My Mom and I where talking about one of the drawings that I have coming out called “Be Yourself” which is a poem that I wrote and my Mom said, “Hey, have you heard of Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” where he says Be Resolutely and Faithfully Who You Are and that led me to reading on him tonight and seeing his influence on some of our greatest people in the last 170 years…a great spirit, a true man of character and honor and conscience

Mohandas Gandhi

Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi (a.k.a. Mahatma Gandhi) was impressed by Thoreau’s arguments. In 1907, about one year into his first satyagraha campaign in South Africa, he wrote a translated synopsis of Thoreau’s argument for Indian Opinion, credited Thoreau’s essay with being “the chief cause of the abolition of slavery in America”, and wrote that “Both his example and writings are at present exactly applicable to the Indians in the Transvaal.”^[18] He later concluded:

Thoreau was a great writer, philosopher, poet, and withal a most practical man, that is, he taught nothing he was not prepared to practice in himself. He was one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced. At the time of the abolition of slavery movement, he wrote his famous essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. He went to gaol for the sake of his principles and suffering humanity. His essay has, therefore, been sanctified by suffering. Moreover, it is written for all time. Its incisive logic is unanswerable.

Gandhi