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I can alter my life by altering my attitude. He who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers.

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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Nothing
Altering
Must
Thorns
Never
Alter
Would
Gather
Life
Attempt
Flowers
Flower
Attitude

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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It would be worth the while if in each town there were a committee appointed to see that the beauty of the town received no detriment. If we have the largest boulder in the county, then it should not belong to an individual, nor be made into door-steps.
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Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up.
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It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.
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I make it my business to extract from Nature what ever nutriment she can furnish me.... I milk the sky and the earth.
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The heart is forever inexperienced.
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We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.
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The still youthful energies of the globe have only to be directed in their proper channel.
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Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.
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If the day and 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.
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Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.
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We have reason to be grateful for celestial phenomena, for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man.
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When was it that men agreed to respect the appearance and not the reality?
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Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, - passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man's capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to!
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If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer.
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Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and through her, God.
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The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.
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He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past
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The fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter, and is about as ample at one season as at another. It is as well for cheerfulness as for warmth and dryness.
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There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.
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As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.
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