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Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. ... Shall we always study to obtain more, and not sometimes be content with less?

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
Must
Study
Needlessly
Always
Though
Obtain
Never
Poor
Neighbors
Men
Actually
Appear
Think
Less
Neighbor
Thinking
Lives
Considered
House
Content
Sometimes
Shall

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It seems as if the more youthful and impressible streams can hardly resist the numerous invitations and temptations to leave theirnative beds and run down their neighbors' channels.
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Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes.
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Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
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We do not live by justice, but by grace.
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It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.
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The imagination never forgets it is a re-membering. It is not foundationless, but most reasonable, and it alone uses all the knowledge of the intellect.
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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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To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
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WE begin to die not in our sense or extremities, but in our divine faculties.
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A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.
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The news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition.
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Yet the New Testament treats of man and man's so-called spiritual affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to alone content me, who am not interested solely in man's religious or moral nature, or in man even.
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What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
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Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau
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Every man must walk to the beat of his own drummer.
Henry David Thoreau
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Give me the old familiar world, post-office and all, with this ever new self, with this infinite expectation and faith, which does not know when it is beaten.
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It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound.
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But what is quackery? It is commonly an attempt to cure the diseases of a man by addressing his body alone. There is need of a physician who shall minister to both soul and body at once, that is, to man. Now he falls between two stools.
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The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.
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Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.
Henry David Thoreau