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I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.

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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Autobiographer
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
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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

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In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead.
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For things to change, we must change.
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The fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter
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The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.
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However mean your life is, meet it and live it.
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I am a majority of one.
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What is human warfare but just this an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
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Be wary of technology it is often merely an improved means to an unimproved end.
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If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
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Unless the human race perspire more than I do, there is no occasion to live by the sweat of their brow. If men cannot get on without money (the smallest amount will suffice), the truest method of earning it is by working as a laborer at one dollar per day. You are least dependent so I speak as an expert, having used several kinds of labor.
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A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!
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My vicinity affords many good walks and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I ever expect to see.
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He may travel who can subsist on the wild fruits and game of the most cultivated country.
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What do the botanists know? Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon, and stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least.
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Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure.
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A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
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To live a better life,--this surely can be done.
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All men are really most attracted by the beauty of plain speech, and they even write in a florid style in imitation of this. Theyprefer to be misunderstood rather than to come short of its exuberance.
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If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?
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I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They can only force me who obey a higher law than I.... I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live?
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