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The imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes.
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
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Imagination
Dives
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Higher
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my everyday business. I am as busy as a bee about it. I ramble over fields on that errand and am never so happy as when I feel myself heavy with honey and wax. I am like a bee searching the livelong day for the sweets of nature.
Henry David Thoreau
Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?
Henry David Thoreau
How earthy old people become --moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.
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
Philosophy, certainly, is some account of truths the fragments and very insignificant parts of which man will practice in this workshop truths infinite and in harmony with infinity, in respect to which the very objects and ends of the so-called practical philosopher will be mere propositions, like the rest.
Henry David Thoreau
Hate can pardon more than love.
Henry David Thoreau
Don't be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.
Henry David Thoreau
There is no just and serene criticism as yet.
Henry David Thoreau
A man can suffocate on courtesy.
Henry David Thoreau
Every man will be a poet if he can otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.
Henry David Thoreau
It must be confessed that horses at present work too exclusively for men, rarely men for horses and the brute degenerates in man's society.
Henry David Thoreau
The question is not what you look at – but how you look & whether you see.
Henry David Thoreau
Birds never sing in caves.
Henry David Thoreau
We admire Chaucer for his sturdy English wit.... But though it is full of good sense and humanity, it is not transcendent poetry.For picturesque description of persons it is, perhaps, without a parallel in English poetry yet it is essentially humorous, as the loftiest genius never is.
Henry David Thoreau
A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.
Henry David Thoreau
Unless we do more than simply learn the trade of our time, we are but apprentices, and not yet masters of the art of life.
Henry David Thoreau
The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize or are fertilized. It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination...without nature-awakened imagination most persons do not really live in the world, they merely pass through it as they live dull lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.
Henry David Thoreau
In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.
Henry David Thoreau
At present the globe goes with a shattered constitution in its orbit.... No doubt the simple powers of nature, properly directed by man, would make it healthy and a paradise as the laws of man's own constitution but wait to be obeyed, to restore him to health and happiness.
Henry David Thoreau
