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My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought - with these I deal.

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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Would
State
Perceived
Common
Falsehood
Sense
Myth
Facts
Significant
Thought
Thoughts
States
Deal
Body
Deals
Falsehoods
Mind
Shall
Myths

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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In wildness is the preservation of the world.
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The child should have the advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge, and is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure.
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I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen.
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Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.
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Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?
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There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.
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A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck.
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I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.
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Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and through her, God.
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The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?
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Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.
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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.
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We should endeavor practically in our lives to correct all the defects which our imagination detects.
Henry David Thoreau
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Be wary of technology it is often merely an improved means to an unimproved end.
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Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
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Live free, child of the mist,- and with respect to knowledge we are allchildren of the mist.
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We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,--at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene their sunny lives onthe sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.
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A true Friendship is as wise as it is tender. The parties to it yield implicitly to the guidance of their love, and know no otherlaw nor kindness.
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However mean your life is, meet it and live it.
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We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.
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