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Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.

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
Communism
Libertarian
Enterprise
Liberty
Government
Way
Furthered
Never
Alacrity
Libertarianism

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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The outward is only the outside of that which is within. Men are not concealed under habits, but are revealed by them they are their true clothes.
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Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.
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The Library is a wilderness of books.
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The pleasures of the intellect are permanent, the pleasures of the heart are transitory.
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Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.
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Keep up the fires of thought, and all will go well.
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As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.
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There are many skillful apprentices, but few master workmen.
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The virtue of making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before does not begin to be superhuman.
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But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.
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The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past days,--mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small- clothes, out of date.
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What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own.
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Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month's labor in the farmer's almanac, to restore our tone and spirits.
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Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.
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This whole earth in which we inhabit is but a point is space.
Henry David Thoreau
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The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.
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In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment to toe that line.
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We have need to be earth-born as well as heaven-born, gegeneis, as was said of the Titans of old, or in a better sense than they.
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Be it life or death, we crave only reality.
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This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge... It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature.
Henry David Thoreau