Quote

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

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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Long as I have lived, and many blasphemers as I have heard and seen, I have never yet heard or witnessed any direct and consciousblasphemy or irreverence but of indirect and habitual, enough. Where is the man who is guilty of direct and personal insolence to Him that made him?
Henry David Thoreau
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It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard.
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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!
Henry David Thoreau
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Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.
Henry David Thoreau
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The fact is, mental philosophy is very like Poverty, which, you know, begins at home and indeed, when it goes abroad, it is poverty itself.
Henry David Thoreau
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See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
Henry David Thoreau
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The Great Snow! How cheerful it is to hear of!
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What is human warfare but just this an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
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Live free, child of the mist,- and with respect to knowledge we are allchildren of the mist.
Henry David Thoreau
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A man may acquire a taste for wine or brandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him.
Henry David Thoreau
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Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much.
Henry David Thoreau
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To regret deeply is to live afresh.
Henry David Thoreau
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It must be confessed that horses at present work too exclusively for men, rarely men for horses and the brute degenerates in man's society.
Henry David Thoreau
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Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe.
Henry David Thoreau
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If you give money, spend yourself with it.
Henry David Thoreau
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Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
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What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and sublimest truth?
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It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
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It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living: how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious for if getting a living is not so, then living is not.
Henry David Thoreau
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The body can feed the body only.
Henry David Thoreau