Genuine, and pinnable to the page. Thoreau wrote it to his friend Harrison Gray Otis Blake from Concord on 6 December 1856, and the sentence was first printed in Letters to Various Persons ↗ (Ticknor and Fields, 1865) on page 145. The wording that circulates today is that printed text word for word — it is a letter, not a line from Walden.
“I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual” Henry David Thoreau, letter to H. G. O. Blake, Concord, 6 December 1856; first printed in Letters to Various Persons (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), p. 145. Verified via Quotle.info. · Verbatim: “I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite,—only a sense of existence.”
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Provenance
Where it comes from
Work
Letters to Various Persons
Letter
To H. G. O. Blake, headed Concord, December 6, 1856 (continued December 7)
First published
Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865, p. 145 — posthumous, edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Scholarly text
The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau (1958), p. 444
But I should not care if I sprouted into a living tree, put forth leaves and flowers, and bore fruit. I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite,—only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety. I am ready to try this for the next ten thousand years, and exhaust it. … O how I laugh when I think of my vague, indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.
Letters to Various Persons (1865), p. 145
Transcribed from the 1865 first printing ↗. The 1958 scholarly Correspondence, as quoted by Wikiquote ↗, reads “what I am & have” and “the next 1000 years” where the printed editions read “and have” and “ten thousand years.”
The December 6 portion is transcribed — headed Concord, December 6, 1856 — among Thoreau’s letters to Harrison Blake ↗, where the passage sits just after a joke about being a cedar post. The next day’s continuation, with the report on reading Walt Whitman, is a separate page ↗ there, and runs on inside the same letter in the 1865 scan ↗.
The first printing is the volume Emerson assembled after Thoreau’s death: the Internet Archive scan of Letters to Various Persons ↗ (Ticknor and Fields, 1865) carries the sentence on page 145, in exactly the wording that circulates today.
Wikiquote’s sourced section ↗ cites the letter as 6–7 December 1856 from The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau (1958), p. 444, and notes that the line is “often quoted since 1865” in the ten-thousand-years form; the archive.org scan of the 1865 volume shows where that wording came from.
The Walden Woods Project ↗ files the line under Wealth & Poverty and sources it identically: Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 6 December 1856.
✓Public domain
The sentence was first published in Letters to Various Persons (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865) and reprinted in F. B. Sanborn’s enlarged Familiar Letters (Houghton Mifflin, 1906) — both far earlier than the 1931 US copyright line, and Project Gutenberg ↗ lists the latter as public domain in the USA. The exact wording quoted here is the 1865 printed text, so it is free to reproduce.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What goes wrong with it
Nobody seriously doubts that Thoreau wrote this. What travels badly is where and when — the line is usually served with no source at all, or with a year that is three off.
✕
Wrong year“Letter to Harrison Blake, 1853” date error
No source at allGoodreads and the aggregator tier sourceless
The Goodreads entry ↗ gives no source line at all — just “— Henry David Thoreau” over crowd-added tags (1856, letter, harrison-gray-blake). No volume, no page, nothing a reader could check. That is how a fully documented sentence ends up looking exactly like a fabricated one.
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Smoothed wordingEvery popular version since 1865 wording
Wikiquote ↗ prints the scholarly text as “I am grateful for what I am & have” and “the next 1000 years”, and notes the familiar “ten thousand years” form dates from the 1865 printing. For the two sentences people actually quote, the only difference is Thoreau’s ampersand.
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Holiday framingNovember greeting cards context
It reads like a Thanksgiving sentiment and gets used as one, but in the letter itself ↗ it is part of an argument about how little a person actually needs, closing with “my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.”
✓Real, and locatable to the page: Thoreau to H. G. O. Blake, Concord, 6 December 1856, first printed in Letters to Various Persons ↗ (1865), p. 145.
Context
What Thoreau was actually doing
It sounds like a card, and every November it gets used as one. In the letter it is nothing of the kind. Thoreau had just come back from Eagleswood, had passed through Worcester at half past three in the morning without waking anybody, and is now needling Blake for being asleep — literally at the depot, and figuratively the rest of the time. “Blake! Brown! are you awake?”
The gratitude line lands mid-argument, right after Thoreau wonders whether he would be content to be a cedar post that lasts twenty-five years, and just before he laughs at his own “vague, indefinite riches.” The next day’s continuation of the same letter tells Blake that Walt Whitman’s second edition “has done me more good than any reading for a long time.” Perpetual thanksgiving, in context, is a claim about how little you need — not a holiday greeting.
My wealth is not possession but enjoyment.
How an 1865 page became the standard wording
Thoreau died in 1862 without collecting his letters. Letters to Various Persons (Ticknor and Fields, 1865) was assembled by Ralph Waldo Emerson — the editor’s notice in the Internet Archive scan ↗ is signed “R.W.E.” That volume is where nearly every modern reprint of this sentence ultimately comes from, which is why the popular wording matches an 1865 page rather than Thoreau’s own ampersand.
F. B. Sanborn reprinted the Blake letters in Familiar Letters, volume VI of the twenty-volume Writings (Houghton Mifflin, 1906). That edition is also free to read, and it is the one whose text carries the 1853 heading now scattered across quote sites.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1817–1862 · American essayist, naturalist and philosopher
Thoreau was an American essayist, naturalist and philosopher — the Concord man who spent two years in a cabin by Walden Pond and turned it into Walden (1854). Harrison Gray Otis Blake, the Worcester correspondent who received this letter, drew some of Thoreau’s most personal and most bracing writing out of him over years of correspondence. Thoreau died in 1862; this letter reached print in 1865, in a posthumous collection put together by his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Henry David Thoreau to H. G. O. Blake, Concord, December 6, 1856, in Letters to Various Persons, ed. Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), 145. Scholarly text: The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 444.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual’?” Last verified 7 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-am-grateful-for-what-i-am-and-have-my-thanksgiving-is/