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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. I do not wish to go below now.

Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Poet
Translator
Writer
birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Travel
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Amid
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Deck
Rather
Moonlight
Wish
Passage
Best
Passages
Mast
Take
Mountains
Masts
World
Mountain
Cabin

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I am struck by the simplicity of light in the atmosphere in the autumn, as if the earth absorbed none, and out of this profusion of dazzling light came the autumnal tints.
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Birds never sing in caves.
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When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a Sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.
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Friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result. No professions nor advances will avail.... It is a drama in which the parties have no part to act.
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Alas! the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe.
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Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.
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What is sour in the house a bracing walk in the woods makes sweet.
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Think for yourself, or others will think for you without thinking of you.
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Continued traveling is far from productive. It begins with wearing away the soles of the shoes, and making the feet sore, and erelong it will wear a man clean up, after making his heart sore into the bargain. I have observed that the afterlife of those who have traveled much is very pathetic.
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Do not read the newspapers.
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There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a hearing of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.
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No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes: yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.
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At death our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart farther from us and are forgotten. Friends are as often brought nearer together as separated by death.
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I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.
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It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have...but shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?
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Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.
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There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.
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What a fool he must be who thinks that his El Dorado is anywhere but where he lives.
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It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
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There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.
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