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

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For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men?
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Be resolutely and faithfully what you are be humbly what you aspire to be.
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Nature is goodness crystallized.
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A stranger may easily detect what is strange to the oldest inhabitant, for the strange is his province.
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The condition-of-England question is a practical one. The condition of England demands a hero, not a poet.
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I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.
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The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.
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Every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us.
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The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.
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Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.
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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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Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life ... would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.
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It is equally impossible to forget our Friends, and to make them answer to our ideal. When they say farewell, then indeed we beginto keep them company. How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual Friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.
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The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day.
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In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.
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When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a Sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.
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When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
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An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they were rarely disappointed.
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