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A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
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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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?
Henry David Thoreau
I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men. The former are so much the freer.
Henry David Thoreau
Those who work much do not work hard.
Henry David Thoreau
It is only necessary that man should start a fence that Nature should carry it on and complete it. The farmer cannot plow quite up to the rails or wall which he himself has placed, and hence it often becomes a hedgerow and sometimes a coppice.
Henry David Thoreau
Your richest veins don't lie nearest the surface.
Henry David Thoreau
If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire,--thinnerthan the paper on which it is printed,--then these things will fill the world for you but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.
Henry David Thoreau
The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality the best of the Hindoo Scripture, for its pure intellectuality. The readeris nowhere raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagvat-Geeta.... It is unquestionably one of the noblest and most sacred scriptures which have come down to us.
Henry David Thoreau
The Ethiopian cannot change his skin nor the leopard his spots.
Henry David Thoreau
If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
Henry David Thoreau
Since most of us spend our lives doing ordinary tasks, the most important thing is to carry them out extraordinarily well.
Henry David Thoreau
There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.
Henry David Thoreau
All things in this world must be seen with youthful, hopeful eyes.
Henry David Thoreau
In the long run, you hit only what you aim at.
Henry David Thoreau
The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea.
Henry David Thoreau
You must get your living by loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied.
Henry David Thoreau
We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn.
Henry David Thoreau
The outward is only the outside of that which is within. Men are not concealed under habits, but are revealed by them they are their true clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.
Henry David Thoreau
I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.
Henry David Thoreau
It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters.
Henry David Thoreau
