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A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

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
Without
Missing
Sentence
Writing
Healthy
Rare
Dews
Color
Perfectly
Azure
Morning
Extremely
Hue
Heaven
Sentences
Dew
True
Evening
Heavens
Thought
Satisfied
Fragrance
Part
Miss
Colors

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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A traveler who looks at things with an impartial eye may see what the oldest inhabitant has not observed.
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I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society.
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You cannot hear music and noise at the same time.
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Music is the crystallization of sound.
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All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.
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Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes.
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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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A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man,--a denizen of the woods. The pale white man! I do not wonder that the African pitied him.
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There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon.
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Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.
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Wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe.
Henry David Thoreau
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The gods are partial to no era, but steadily shines their light in the heavens, while the eye of the beholder is turned to stone.There was but the sun and the eye from the first. The ages have not added a new ray to the one, nor altered a fibre of the other.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart it being much more sensitive.
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A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.
Henry David Thoreau
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As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is equally impossible to forget our Friends, and to make them answer to our ideal. When they say farewell, then indeed we beginto keep them company. How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual Friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.
Henry David Thoreau
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The Oriental philosophy approaches easily loftier themes than the modern aspires to and no wonder if it sometimes prattle about them. It only assigns their due rank respectively to Action and Contemplation, or rather does full justice to the latter. Western philosophers have not conceived of the significance of Contemplation in their sense.
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It is not in vain that man speaks to man. This is the value of literature.
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All questions rely on the present for their solution. Time measures nothing but itself. The word that is written may be postponed,but not that on the lip. If this is what the occasion says, let the occasion say it.
Henry David Thoreau
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We love to hear some men speak, though we hear not what they say the very air they breathe is rich and perfumed, and the sound of their voices falls on the ear like the rustling of leaves or the crackling of the fire. They stand many deep.
Henry David Thoreau