Quote

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!

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
Men
Saws
Passings
Traveller
Life
Singing
Season
Awakened
Dying
Awake
Infinitely
Divine
Related
Brief
Unimproved
Almost
Remembered
Wholly
Travellers
Away
Seasons
Strain
Anon
Night
Passing
Finite
Divinely
Music
Capacity
Narrow
Expanded

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Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever.
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In the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn.
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Surely the writer is to address a world of laborers, and such therefore must be his own discipline.
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One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in.
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Things don't change. We change.
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If there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveler always has a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there.
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If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
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All good things are wild and free.
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As we looked up in silence to those distant lights, we were reminded that it was a rare imagination which first taught that the stars are worlds, and had conferred a great benefit on mankind.
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Alas! the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe.
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A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally, as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only. We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.
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What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator.
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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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Men go to a fire for entertainment. When I see how eagerly men will run to a fire, whether in warm or in cold weather, by day or by night, dragging an engine at their heels, I'm astonished to perceive how good a purpose the level of excitement is made to serve.
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You never gain something but that you lose something.
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All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity.
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Only the defeated and deserters go to war.
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I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect...always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished.
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