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What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
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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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
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Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.
Henry David Thoreau
We make needless ado about capital punishment,--taking lives, when there is no life to take.
Henry David Thoreau
While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
Henry David Thoreau
To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a fountain of health.
Henry David Thoreau
No man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. No man has the desire and the ability to work onhigh things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging.
Henry David Thoreau
This life we live is a strange dream, and I don't believe at all any account men give of it.
Henry David Thoreau
When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another.
Henry David Thoreau
All fables, indeed, have their morals but the innocent enjoy the story.
Henry David Thoreau
I was awakened at midnight by some heavy, low-flying bird, probably a loon, flapping by close over my head, along the shore. So, turning the other side of my half-clad body to the fire, I sought slumber again.
Henry David Thoreau
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
How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.
Henry David Thoreau
A fortified town is like a man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his business.
Henry David Thoreau
I repeat that in this sense the most splendid court in Christendom is provincial, having authority to consult about Transalpine interests only, and not the affairs of Rome. A prætor or proconsul would suffice to settle the questions which absorb the attention of the English Parliament and the American Congress.
Henry David Thoreau
Politics is but a narrow field.
Henry David Thoreau
All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
Henry David Thoreau
What avails it that another loves you, if he does not understand you? Such love is a curse.
Henry David Thoreau
There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.
Henry David Thoreau
It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.
Henry David Thoreau
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.
Henry David Thoreau
Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.
Henry David Thoreau
