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The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.
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
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Comes
Standard
Best
Psychology
Never
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Mass
Degrades
Members
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Level
Lowest
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
Verily, chemistry is not a splitting of hairs when you have got half a dozen raw Irishmen in the laboratory.
Henry David Thoreau
Nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow. She seems not to have provided for, but by a thousand contrivances against it.
Henry David Thoreau
We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.
Henry David Thoreau
Did ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them - that it was a vain endeavor?
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
To the virtuous man, the universe is the only sanctum sanctorum, and the penetralia of the temple are the broad noon of his existence.
Henry David Thoreau
As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
Henry David Thoreau
Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye.
Henry David Thoreau
What is wanted is men of principle, who recognize a higher law than the decision of the majority. The marines and the militia whose bodies were used lately were not men of sense nor of principle in a high moral sense they were not men at all.
Henry David Thoreau
Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life.
Henry David Thoreau
Let us not play at kittly-benders. There is a solid bottom everywhere.
Henry David Thoreau
For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle. What a coarse and imperfect use Indiansand hunters make of nature! No wonder that their race is so soon exterminated.
Henry David Thoreau
The most interesting thing which I heard of, in this township of Hull, was an unfailing spring, whose locality was pointed out tome on the side of a distant hill, as I was panting along the shore, though I did not visit it. Perhaps, if I should go through Rome, it would be some spring on the Capitoline Hill I should remember the longest.
Henry David Thoreau
I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
If we dealt only with the false and dishonest, we should at last forget how to speak truth.
Henry David Thoreau
No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.
Henry David Thoreau
One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in.
Henry David Thoreau
