Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

A recasting of the opening sentence of the Conclusion paragraph beginning with the lesson of Thoreau’s experiment. A conditional report becomes two second-person imperatives. Mark Sullivan identifies this very wording as a misquotation in his 2016 Thoreau Society Annual Gathering essay about tattoos; the original source paragraph confirms the difference. The Wikiquote talk page was already discussing this conversion to the imperative in September 2009. This run did not establish who first made the paraphrase.

Having explained that he left the woods because he had other lives to live and did not want to turn his experiment into another rut, Thoreau draws a lesson from it. He describes the unexpected possibilities opened by pursuing an imagined life and simplifying one’s wants. The paragraph ends by telling the builder of castles in the air to put foundations beneath them.

Acting toward an imagined way of life can disclose possibilities that habitual living hides. The passage links that confidence to simplifying life and doing the work needed to give an ideal a foundation.

The popular imperative is not a verbatim sentence from Walden. It removes the first-person report of an experiment, splits the conditional into commands, and omits both the unexpected kind of success and the surrounding argument about simplicity.

• ShortenedGo confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined. The two imperatives reproduced and explicitly called a misquotation by Mark Sullivan in his 2016 essay on Thoreau tattoos. Where it was seen

Life, Dreams, Change, Courage, Wisdom

• I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
• If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
• No one can choose a beneficial direction in life without hope that change for the better is possible. William W. Purkey
• While everything in life adds to, or detracts from, human success or failure, nothing is more important in life than people. It is the people who create a respectful, optimistic, trusting and intentional society. William W. Purkey
• People possess untapped potential in all areas of human endeavor. The uniqueness of human beings is that no clear limits to potential have been discovered. William W. Purkey

• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Walden
• commons.digitalthoreau.org/tsag2016/friday-july-8/getting-inked-henry-david-thoreau-and-american-tattoo-art
• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Henry_David_Thoreau

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.” Attributed to Henry David Thoreau. Not in these words. The idea is in Walden (1854), Chapter 18, “Conclusion”. Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/go-confidently-in-the-direction-of-your-dreams/ (checked 25 October 2026).

Have a different wording, or a source we missed? Check it or submit it.

Do you hold the rights to anything on this page? Tell us.