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What is wanted is men of principle, who recognize a higher law than the decision of the majority. The marines and the militia whose bodies were used lately were not men of sense nor of principle in a high moral sense they were not men at all.

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
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Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
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Henry D. Thoreau
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The world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand within it.
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I think that Nature meant kindly when she made our brothers few. However, my voice is still for peace.
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You must get your living by loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied.
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I have not read far in the statutes of this Commonwealth. It is not profitable reading. They do not always say what is true and they do not always mean what they say.
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I have seen some whose consciences, owing undoubtedly to former indulgence, had grown to be as irritable as spoilt children, and at length gave them no peace. They did not know when to swallow their cud, and their lives of course yielded no milk.
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Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? Learn to split wood, at least.
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Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping.
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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.
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I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.
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Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, - passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man's capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to!
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Politics is but a narrow field.
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I hear beyond the range of sound, I see beyond the range of sight, New earths and skies and seas around, And in my day the sun doth pale his light.
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Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
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Men are as innocent as the morning to the unsuspicious.
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Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse.
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We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.
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There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.
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We live but a fraction of our lives.
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Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics.
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Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.
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