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Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.

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
Thus
Advantage
Show
Shows
Government
Successfully
Even
Imposed
Men
Impose
Governments

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We have not so good a right to hate any as our Friend.
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We never conceive the greatness of our fates.
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Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.
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We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.
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No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.
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Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours and yet how long it stands in vain!... Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.
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As the skies appear to a man, so is his mind. Some see only clouds there some, prodigies and portents some rarely look up at all their heads, like the brutes,' are directed toward Earth. Some behold there serenity, purity, beauty ineffable. The world runs to see the panorama, when there is a panorama in the sky which few go to see.
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So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old.
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There is absolutely no common sense, it is common non-sense.
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But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constantand imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.
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It is not so important that many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere for that will leaven the whole lump.
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City life is millions of people being lonesome together.
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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.
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I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety.
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It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
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It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have...but shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?
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I look upon England today as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated fromlong housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn.
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I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of a coarse jest, yet when you speak earnestly and seriously on the subject, is silent.
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At the extreme north, the voyagers are obliged to dance and act plays for employment.
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The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering for want of society. Was never a case like it. First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it was indigestion of the society I got.
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