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The man who does not betake himself at once and desperately to sawing is called a loafer, though he may be knocking at the doors of heaven all the while.

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
Doors
Called
Though
Heaven
Loafer
Doe
Sawing
May
Loafers
Work
Knocking
Men
Desperately

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A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.
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The Oriental philosophy approaches easily loftier themes than the modern aspires to and no wonder if it sometimes prattle about them. It only assigns their due rank respectively to Action and Contemplation, or rather does full justice to the latter. Western philosophers have not conceived of the significance of Contemplation in their sense.
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Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe.
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I saw a muskrat come out of a hole in the ice ... While I am looking at him, I am thinking what he is thinking of me. He is a different sort of man, that's all.
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Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man's morning work in this world?
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The prosaic man sees things badly, or with the bodily sense but the poet sees them clad in beauty, with the spiritual sense.
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If you give money, spend yourself with it.
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You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land there is no other life but this.
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When I meet a government which says to me, Your money or your life, why should I be in haste to give it my money?
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I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
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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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It is one of the signs of the times. We confess that we have risen from reading this book with enlarged ideas, and grander conceptions of our duties in this world. It did expand us a little.
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The virtue of making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before does not begin to be superhuman.
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How meanly and grossly do we deal with nature!
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That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.
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Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other.
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Not secondary to the sun, she gives us his blaze again, Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day... In Heaven queen she is among the spheres She, mistress-like, makes all things to be pure.
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The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact.
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The violence of love is as much to be dreaded as that of hate.
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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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