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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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Autobiographer
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
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Don't spend your time in drilling soldiers, who may turn out hirelings after all, but give to undrilled peasantry a country to fight for.
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We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice.
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It is a momentous fact that a man may be good, or he may be bad his life may be true, or it may be false it may be either a shame or a glory to him. The good man builds himself up the bad man destroys himself.
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But the place which you have selected for your camp, though never so rough and grim, begins at once to have its attractions, and becomes a very centre of civilization to you: Home is home, be it never so homely.
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Fishing has been styled 'a contemplative man's recreation,' ... and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation.
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Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
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Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.
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I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.
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I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect...always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished.
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Music is the sound of the universal laws promulgated. It is the only assured tone. There are in it such strains as far surpass anyman's faith in the loftiness of his destiny. Things are to be learned which it will be worth the while to learn.
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To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a fountain of health.
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I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly.
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Let us consider under what disadvantages Science has hitherto labored before we pronounce thus confidently on her progress.
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I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.
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In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.
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Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?
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Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.
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The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate the world....There is naked Nature, inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.
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I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side.
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