Quote

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?

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
Forever
Reader
Compared
Looking
Students
Routine
History
Poetry
Student
Always
Growth
Necessity
Supersede
Life
Philosophy
Curiosity
Seer
Seen
Method
Seers
Courses
Merely
Alert
Course
Discipline
Admirable

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Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.
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As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented.
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Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?
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I do not believe there are eight hundred human beings on the globe.
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It is only necessary that man should start a fence that Nature should carry it on and complete it. The farmer cannot plow quite up to the rails or wall which he himself has placed, and hence it often becomes a hedgerow and sometimes a coppice.
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Men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries.
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The words of some men are thrown forcibly against you and adhere like burrs.
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The necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things to the scholar is rarely well remembered.
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The dry grasses are not dead for me. A beautiful form has as much life at one season as another.
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Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and Spring.
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Then at night the general stillness is more impressive than any sound, but occasionally you hear the note of an owl farther or nearer in the woods, and if near a lake, the semihuman cry of the loons at their unearthly revels.
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I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government
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So long as a man is faithful to himself, everything is in his favor, government, society, the very sun, moon, and stars.
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We fritter away our energy and creativity . . . we get bogged down in the thick of thin things.
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Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances.
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Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
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Why look in the dark for light?
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We are all of us Apollos serving some Admetus.
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A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject of the Turkish government.
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Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.
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