Quote

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least - and it is commonly more than that - sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.

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
Four
Solitude
Commonly
Hours
Absolutely
Engagement
Free
Fields
Worldly
Spirit
Spend
Spirits
Nature
Walking
Preserve
Cannot
Unless
Preserves
Think
Health
Hills
Engagements
Thinking
Least
Woods
Sauntering

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Much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no character.
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Pray, for what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuviæ at last to go from this world to another newly furnished, and leave this to be burned?
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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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It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however, ancient, can be trusted without proof. ... Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
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We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.
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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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Not secondary to the sun, she gives us his blaze again, Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day... In Heaven queen she is among the spheres She, mistress-like, makes all things to be pure.
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Heal yourselves, doctors by God I live.
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The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.
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This whole earth in which we inhabit is but a point is space.
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He who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth.
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For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men?
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Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners?
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The higher the mountain on which you stand, the less change in the prospect from year to year, from age to age. Above a certain height there is no change.
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They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy evil, that they may no longer have have it to regret.
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It is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning.
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The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.
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I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.
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If Nature is our mother, then God is our father.
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Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.
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