There is no remedy for love but to love more.

A leading transcendentalist, early naturalist, and lifelong abolitionist, Henry David Thoreau started keeping a personal journal when he was 20 at the suggestion of another quintessentially American writer-philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Two years later, having made a habit of journaling, Thoreau jotted down this note. What inspired him to record the thought, we cannot know, but in retrospect the line might be read as a window into his life’s work. A core tenet of transcendentalism is a conviction in the inherent goodness of people and nature. Likewise, a central premise of civil disobedience in the interest of equal rights is that all people are created equal. Thoreau’s writing on the latter subject would go on to influence many other great thinker-activists working toward equality, from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr.