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Spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.

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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Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what we do and yet how much is not done by us!
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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.
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Men are probably nearer the essential truth in their superstitions than in their science.
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There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of expediency. There is no such thing as sliding up- hill.In morals the only sliders are backsliders.
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The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.
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The highest condition of art is artlessness.
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It is not worth while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.
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The constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth.
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Politics is but a narrow field.
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Long as I have lived, and many blasphemers as I have heard and seen, I have never yet heard or witnessed any direct and consciousblasphemy or irreverence but of indirect and habitual, enough. Where is the man who is guilty of direct and personal insolence to Him that made him?
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Simplicity is the law of Nature for man as well as for flowers. When the tapestry (corolla) of the nuptial bed (calyx) is excessive, luxuriant, it is unproductive. The fertile flowers are single, not double.
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We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we.
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As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.
Henry David Thoreau
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If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life.
Henry David Thoreau
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Generally speaking, the political news, whether domestic or foreign, might be written today for the next ten years with sufficientaccuracy. Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and I might attend.
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How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bedridden all world-ridden.
Henry David Thoreau
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Do not despair of life. You have no doubt force enough to overcome your obstacles. Think of the fox prowling through wood and field in a winter night for something to satisfy his hunger. Notwithstanding cold and the hounds and traps, his race survives. I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.
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We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.
Henry David Thoreau
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The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.
Henry David Thoreau
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I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Henry David Thoreau