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I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.

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
Nature
Awe
Cease
Object
Begin
Objects
Vision
Seeing
Understand

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How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seedtime of character?
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Lose the world, get lost in it, and find your soul.
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As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.
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It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always. The conscience really does not, and ought not to monopolizethe whole of our lives, any more than the heart or the head. It is as liable to disease as any other part.
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The still youthful energies of the globe have only to be directed in their proper channel.
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I knew that the wall was the main thing in Quebec, and had cost a great deal of money.... In fact, these are the only remarkable walls we have in North America, though we have a good deal of Virginia fence, it is true.
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Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.
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Biography, too, is liable to the same objection it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am not I, who will be?
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It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador a greater wildness than in some recess of Concord.
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It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
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The only free road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and managed by the Vigilant Committee. They have tunneled under the whole breadth of the land.
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Be it life or death, we crave only reality.
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We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not.
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Think for yourself, or others will think for you without thinking of you.
Henry David Thoreau
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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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It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
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A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority it is not even a minority then but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.
Henry David Thoreau
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Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.
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While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
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My friend is one... who take me for what I am.
Henry David Thoreau