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Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid.
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
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
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Naturalist
Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Men
Defined
Spirituality
Avoid
Heaven
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
Like speaks to like only labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.
Henry David Thoreau
However mean your life is, meet it and live it do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.
Henry David Thoreau
No doubt another may also think for me but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
Henry David Thoreau
What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?
Henry David Thoreau
I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.
Henry David Thoreau
I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect...always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished.
Henry David Thoreau
The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable of a bad one, to make it less valuable.
Henry David Thoreau
Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.
Henry David Thoreau
In 1848, Thoreau went to jail for refusing, as a protest against the Mexican war, to pay his poll tax. When RW Emerson came to bail him out, Emerson said, 'Henry, what are you doing in there?' Thoreau quietly replied, 'Ralph, what are you doing out there?'
Henry David Thoreau
Where there is a lull in truth an institution springs up.
Henry David Thoreau
I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters.
Henry David Thoreau
If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
Henry David Thoreau
Nothing can shock a brave man but dullness.
Henry David Thoreau
Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.
Henry David Thoreau
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
Henry David Thoreau
There is one thought for the field, another for the house. I would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted in the house.
Henry David Thoreau
I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
Henry David Thoreau
Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.
Henry David Thoreau
Many men walk by day few walk by night. It is a different season.
Henry David Thoreau
The best way to correct a mistake is to make it right.
Henry David Thoreau
