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The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize or are fertilized. It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination...without nature-awakened imagination most persons do not really live in the world, they merely pass through it as they live dull lives of quiet desperation.

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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Lives
Gratitude
Fertilized
Really
Makes
Merely
Fruitful
Men
Nature
Neither
Barren
World
Persons
Birth
Desperation
Soul
Quiet
Awakened
Live
Marriage
Dull
Gives
Intellect
Without
Imagination
Pass
Fertilize
Giving

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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Men nowhere, east or west, live yet a natural life, round which the vine clings, and which the elm willingly shadows. Man would desecrate it by his touch, and so the beauty of the world remains veiled to him. He needs not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized, on the soil of earth.
Henry David Thoreau
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Resign yourself to the influence of the earth.
Henry David Thoreau
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There are many skillful apprentices, but few master workmen.
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The Slothful do not have the time to become virtuous or despicable.
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We are all of us Apollos serving some Admetus.
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When a noble deed is done, who is likely to appreciate it? They who are noble themselves.
Henry David Thoreau
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I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.
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The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.
Henry David Thoreau
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If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire,--thinnerthan the paper on which it is printed,--then these things will fill the world for you but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.
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WE begin to die not in our sense or extremities, but in our divine faculties.
Henry David Thoreau
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If I thought that I could speak with discrimination and impartiality of the nations of Christendom, I should praise them, but it tasks me too much. They seem to be the most civil and humane, but I may be mistaken.
Henry David Thoreau
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The man who does not betake himself at once and desperately to sawing is called a loafer, though he may be knocking at the doors of heaven all the while.
Henry David Thoreau
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Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.
Henry David Thoreau
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Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
Henry David Thoreau
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Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.
Henry David Thoreau
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There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hand. I love a broad margin to my life.
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On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world.
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The golden mean in ethics, as in physics, is the centre of the system and that about which all revolve, and though to a distant and plodding planet it be an uttermost extreme, yet one day, when that planet's year is completed, it will be found to be central.
Henry David Thoreau
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How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seedtime of character?
Henry David Thoreau
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I am accustomed to think very long of going anywhere,--am slow to move. I hope to hear a response of the oracle first.
Henry David Thoreau