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Heroes are often the most ordinary of men.
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
Heroes
Hero
Ordinary
Often
Men
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
Nature has left nothing to the mercy of man.
Henry David Thoreau
I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too much patience of this kind.
Henry David Thoreau
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.
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
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment. [Like they say, 'Every cloud has a silver lining'...so if you are patient, expect, anticipate, look and work for some good to come from the cloud, you will be rewarded eventually!]
Henry David Thoreau
Men nowhere, east or west, live yet a natural life, round which the vine clings, and which the elm willingly shadows. Man would desecrate it by his touch, and so the beauty of the world remains veiled to him. He needs not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized, on the soil of earth.
Henry David Thoreau
There are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or inlet, yet unexplored by him.
Henry David Thoreau
It [is of] some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessities of life.
Henry David Thoreau
With all your science can you tell me how it is, and when it is, that light comes into the soul?
Henry David Thoreau
No man's thoughts are new, but the style of their expression is the never-failing novelty which cheers and refreshes men. If we were to answer the question, whether the mass of men, as we know them, talk as the standard authors and reviewers write, or rather as this man writes, we should say that he alone begins to write their language at all.
Henry David Thoreau
What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
Henry David Thoreau
To the man who cherishes a secret in his breast, there is a still greater secret unexplored. Our most indifferent acts may be a matter for secrecy, but whatever we do with the utmost truthfulness and integrity, by virtue of its pureness, must be transparent as light.
Henry David Thoreau
The Library is a wilderness of books.
Henry David Thoreau
How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?
Henry David Thoreau
As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.
Henry David Thoreau
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau
The news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition.
Henry David Thoreau
I want the flower and fruit of a man that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse.
Henry David Thoreau
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?
Henry David Thoreau
The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of human art to its remotest shore. There is no telling what it may not vomit up.
Henry David Thoreau
