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After all the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.

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
Well
Rooms
Mask
Exhibits
Play
Doubt
Former
Excessive
Many
Least
Drawing
Possesses
Hard
Humanity
Field
Advantages
Make
Hand
Advantage
Ceremony
Faces
Fields
Shaking
Rubbing
Hands
Battle
Sincerity
Hearty
Wells
Room
Noses
Pretension

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If you're familiar with a principle you don't have to be familiar with all of its applications.
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I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman simply because she has regular features.
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In society you will not find health, but in nature. Unless our feet at least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would bepale and livid. Society is always diseased, and the best is the most so.
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When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable.
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Much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no character.
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A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!
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I make myself rich by making my wants few.
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It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.
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Under the one word house are included the schoolhouse, the almshouse, the jail, the tavern, the dwellinghouse and the meanest shed or cave in which men live contains elements of all these. But nowhere on the earth stands the entire and perfect house.
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