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Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
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Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.
Henry David Thoreau
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Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love and in proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal. . . . Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.
Henry David Thoreau
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I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.
Henry David Thoreau
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An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they were rarely disappointed.
Henry David Thoreau
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Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savagestands on the unelastic plank of famine.
Henry David Thoreau
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The child should have the advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge, and is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure.
Henry David Thoreau
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Sell your clothes- keep your thoughts.
Henry David Thoreau
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I have a room all to myself it is nature.
Henry David Thoreau
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The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.
Henry David Thoreau
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A kitten is so flexible that she is almost double the hind parts are equivalent to another kitten with which the fore part plays. She does not discover that her tail belongs to her till you tread upon it.
Henry David Thoreau
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Those who work much do not work hard.
Henry David Thoreau
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Pray, for what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuviæ at last to go from this world to another newly furnished, and leave this to be burned?
Henry David Thoreau
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I am not afraid of praise, for I have practiced it on myself.
Henry David Thoreau
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I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.
Henry David Thoreau
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If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui.
Henry David Thoreau
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Here or nowhere is our heaven.
Henry David Thoreau
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I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side.
Henry David Thoreau
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No man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. No man has the desire and the ability to work onhigh things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging.
Henry David Thoreau
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You must converse much with the field and the woods if you would imbibe such health into your mind and spirit as you covet for your body
Henry David Thoreau
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The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past days,--mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small- clothes, out of date.
Henry David Thoreau