One World At A Time

More Thoreauvian humanism:

… No more satisfying deathbed utterance can be imagined for Thoreau than his reply to a question put gently to him by Parker Pillsbury a few days before his death … [Pillsbury, a former minister who had left the church over slavery, said] “You seem so near the brink of the dark river … that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.” Thoreau’s answer summed up his life. “One world at a time,” he said. [Citation to: F. B. Sanborn, The Personality of Thoreau (Boston, 1901), pp. 68-69].

Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Berkeley: University of California Press (1986), 389.