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The ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds.
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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Hear
Wont
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Trivial
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Made
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Men
Suppose
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Ears
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact.
Henry David Thoreau
Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation. They told me that they had some in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old which was as good as ever. Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? It is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect.
Henry David Thoreau
How little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. They insult nature. Every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws.
Henry David Thoreau
The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body.
Henry David Thoreau
Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.
Henry David Thoreau
I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
Henry David Thoreau
He who is conversant with the supernal powers will not worship these inferior deities of the wind, waves, tide, and sunshine. Butwe would not disparage the importance of such calculations as we have described. They are truths in physics because they are true in ethics.
Henry David Thoreau
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined...
Henry David Thoreau
The gods cannot misunderstand, man cannot explain.
Henry David Thoreau
The voice of nature is always encouraging.
Henry David Thoreau
After all the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.
Henry David Thoreau
We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.
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
What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation!
Henry David Thoreau
Hear! hear! screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it.
Henry David Thoreau
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Henry David Thoreau
Most men, it seems to me, do not care for Nature and would sell their share in all her beauty, as long as they may live, for a stated sum - many for a glass of rum. Thank God, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!
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
No people ever lived by cursing their fathers, however great a curse their fathers might have been to them.
Henry David Thoreau
All good things are cheap: all bad are very dear.
Henry David Thoreau
