What are Thoreau's views on conformity and nonconformity?

Like his
good friend and fellow transcendentalist Emerson, Thoreau believed that conformity was most
often the path to misery. He argued that nonconformity was the way to find your truest and most
joyful self. Thoreau asserted that the mass of humankind live in "quiet desperation"
because of conforming to society's dictates.

In ,
Thoreau recounts the joys of living a nonconformist life in a tiny cabin on the shores of Walden
Pond. His goal was to simplify his life as much as possible in order to get at the essence of
living, unencumbered by the baggage of material goods.

In this book, he
writes to praise nonconformity to the world's ways. He writes that the joyful life is the
highest good a person can achieve, though it is not one understood by society:

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and
life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more
immortal,that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily
to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated.

Thoreau uses the dullof dusty and rutted roads to describe
conformity. Then, mixing metaphors, he describes an alternative path of standing on the deck of
a ship to see the world's beauties. This path of nonconformity is preferable to sitting closed,
like an ordinary person, in a cabin below:

How worn and
dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I
did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the
world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.

Thoreau makes one of the most eloquent pleas for nonconformity in
all of literature, in my opinion.