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Left his Unitarian beliefs because they were too restrictive. Although he did not abandon all of his beliefs, he used some of them to back up his philosophy. He ultimately believed that man cannot gain knowledge through institutions, but from their own intuition and power of the mind.

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Way of thinking that started in the 1820s and carried to the 1880s during the American Renaissance.

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Our nation was flourishing with new ideas, literature, music, poetry, artwork and architecture. During this time, transcendentalists were fighting slavery and developing their own ideas about their new way of thinking including women's rights and slavery.

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Henry David Thoreau
Brahmin
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Walt Whitman
Edgar Allan Poe
Nathaniel Hawthorne

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nature=god
god is omnipresent
man is divine
intuition
self-reliance
society is the source of corruption
Idealism
Materialism is bad
Technology is bad
Emphasis is on the "here and now"

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1. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.
Say what you believe in and people will follow you. This relates to a teenager because we are looking
for approval from everyone else but we should just follow our own path.

2. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.
Society is working against you so we should not give in to the conformity. This would be useful today because we should follow our own intuition rather than follow organizations.

3. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
The only thing holding us back is our own mind. We should rely on ourselves and keep our minds strong.

4. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.
We should live for ourselves not to “post on social media” or to show off our success.

5. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
If we keep the same way of thinking our whole lives we will never grow. We should keep our minds open to new ideas.

6. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
When someone starts a movement or group, it lives on to be their legacy.

7. Life only avails, not the having lived.
Life itself is more important than the fact you’re living it. We should think of things bigger than ourselves.

8. Insist on yourself; never imitate.
Put yourself as priority sometimes and do not think of other people. It is okay to better yourself
without hurting other people.

9. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
We rely on technology instead of our own brains.

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Thoreau lived a simple life near Walden Pond for some time to contemplate nature and transcendentalism and later wrote a book about it which shaped the way of thinking forever. He compares humans and the way of life to objects in nature which makes the reader think life is as simple as "one action affects the next"

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Thoreau says, "Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights. The shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us, " which encourages the reader to think of the bigger picture.