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A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.
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
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Naturalist
Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Pure
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Land
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.
Henry David Thoreau
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
Every sunset I witness inspires me with the desire to go to West as distant and as fair as that which the sun goes down. Eastward I go only by force but westward I go free.
Henry David Thoreau
Be not merely good. Be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau
Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other. Not only individuals but states have thus a confirmed dyspepsia.
Henry David Thoreau
Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.
Henry David Thoreau
There is one thought for the field, another for the house. I would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted in the house.
Henry David Thoreau
It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ.
Henry David Thoreau
It would be worth the while if in each town there were a committee appointed to see that the beauty of the town received no detriment. If we have the largest boulder in the county, then it should not belong to an individual, nor be made into door-steps.
Henry David Thoreau
The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.
Henry David Thoreau
It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them.
Henry David Thoreau
We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
Henry David Thoreau
Those who work much do not work hard.
Henry David Thoreau
Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs.
Henry David Thoreau
We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn.
Henry David Thoreau
I have much to learn of the Indian, nothing of the missionary.
Henry David Thoreau
To be awake is to be alive.
Henry David Thoreau
The best way to correct a mistake is to make it right.
Henry David Thoreau
A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.
Henry David Thoreau
Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
Henry David Thoreau
