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The birds I heard today, which, fortunately, did not come within the scope of my science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation.

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
Within
Fortunately
Science
Sang
Nature
Scope
Today
Birds
Firsts
Bird
Come
Creation
First
Heard
Morning
Freshly

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However mean your life is, meet it and live it.
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Every gazette brings accounts of the untutored freaks of the wind,--shipwrecks and hurricanes which the mariner and planter acceptas special or general providences but they touch our consciences, they remind us of our sins. Another deluge would disgrace mankind.
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The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that hein some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages.
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Who is old enough to have learned from experience?
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My actual life is a fact, in view of which I have no occasion to congratulate myself but for my faith and aspiration I have respect. It is from these that I speak.
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The state does not demand justice of its members, but thinks that it succeeds very well with the least degree of it, hardly more than rogues practice and so do the neighborhood and the family. What is commonly called Friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues.
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Music is perpetual, and only the hearing is intermittent.
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Go confidently ... Live the life that you imagined.
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We should endeavor practically in our lives to correct all the defects which our imagination detects.
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All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity.
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Yet the New Testament treats of man and man's so-called spiritual affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to alone content me, who am not interested solely in man's religious or moral nature, or in man even.
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We do not live by justice, but by grace.
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Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature -if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you -know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.
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I have heard a good many pretend that they are going to die or that they have died, for aught that I know. Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it. They have n't got life enough in them.... Only half a dozen or so have died since the world began.
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Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.
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When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, [I] submit myself to my instinct to decide for me.
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I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.
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No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.
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The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
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