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It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
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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Autobiographer
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
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Naturalist
Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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Clearer
Better
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Paradise
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
Whatever has not come under the sway of man is wild. In this sense original and independent men are wild - not tamed and broken by society.
Henry David Thoreau
There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.
Henry David Thoreau
How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seedtime of character?
Henry David Thoreau
Could slavery suggest a more complete servility than some of these journals exhibit? Is there any dust which their conduct does not lick, and make fouler still with its slime?
Henry David Thoreau
The authority of government . . . can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.
Henry David Thoreau
Even in civilized communities, the embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development.
Henry David Thoreau
Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge college is as solitary as a dervis in the desert.
Henry David Thoreau
Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve.
Henry David Thoreau
The husbandman is always a better Greek than the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in commemorating it.
Henry David Thoreau
Like speaks to like only labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.
Henry David Thoreau
My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.
Henry David Thoreau
Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved bythem. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows.
Henry David Thoreau
The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show.
Henry David Thoreau
How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my everyday business. I am as busy as a bee about it. I ramble over fields on that errand and am never so happy as when I feel myself heavy with honey and wax. I am like a bee searching the livelong day for the sweets of nature.
Henry David Thoreau
The oldest, wisest politician grows not more human so, but is merely a gray wharf rat at last.
Henry David Thoreau
The gods are partial to no era, but steadily shines their light in the heavens, while the eye of the beholder is turned to stone.There was but the sun and the eye from the first. The ages have not added a new ray to the one, nor altered a fibre of the other.
Henry David Thoreau
If we cannot sing of faith and triumph, we will sing our despair. We will be that kind of bird. There are day owls, and there arenight owls, and each is beautiful and even musical while about its business.
Henry David Thoreau
The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?
Henry David Thoreau
I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account.
Henry David Thoreau
It is not when I am going to meet him, but when I am just turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover what God is. I say, God. I am not sure that that is the name. You will know what I mean.
Henry David Thoreau