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The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body.
Henry David Thoreau
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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
Henry David Thoreau
Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform.
Henry David Thoreau
Lose the world, get lost in it, and find your soul.
Henry David Thoreau
Show me two villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the other a merely trivial and treelesswaste, or with only a single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate drinkers.
Henry David Thoreau
If however the law is so promulgated that it of necessity makes you an agent of injustices against another, then I say to you ... break the law.
Henry David Thoreau
Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.
Henry David Thoreau
We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.
Henry David Thoreau
The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.
Henry David Thoreau
If you will not try, you will go to your grave with your song still inside you.
Henry David Thoreau
We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.
Henry David Thoreau
Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the works behind them, as they are battered down by the encroachments of time but while they loiter, they and their works both fall prey to the arch enemy.
Henry David Thoreau
As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.
Henry David Thoreau
It [is of] some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessities of life.
Henry David Thoreau
If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
Henry David Thoreau
The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
Henry David Thoreau
Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass, - this was my daily work.
Henry David Thoreau
Where there is a lull in truth an institution springs up.
Henry David Thoreau
It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them.
Henry David Thoreau
I do not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster.
Henry David Thoreau
We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.
Henry David Thoreau
