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The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

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
Savages
Wiser
Civilized
Experienced
Experience
Men
Savage

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By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.
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What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and sublimest truth?
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How earthy old people become --moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.
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be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else's idea of yourself should be.
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Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art.
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If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
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Be as the sailor who keeps the polestar in his eye. By so doing we may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we will maintain a true course.
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Glances of true beauty can be seen in the faces of those who live in true meekness.
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I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They can only force me who obey a higher law than I.... I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live?
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Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.
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A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject of the Turkish government.
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Philosophy, certainly, is some account of truths the fragments and very insignificant parts of which man will practice in this workshop truths infinite and in harmony with infinity, in respect to which the very objects and ends of the so-called practical philosopher will be mere propositions, like the rest.
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We are superior to the joy we experience.
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Do what you love. Know your own bone gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
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There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.
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We should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.
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A journal is a repository for all those fragmentary ideas and odd scraps of information that might otherwise be lost and which some day might lead to more harmonious compositions.
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As I love nature, as I love singing birds...I love thee, my friend.
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If men were to be destroyed and the books they have written were to be transmitted to a new race of creatures, in a new world, what kind of record would be found in them of so remarkable a phenomenon as the rainbow?
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