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I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Nature
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Parcel
Part
Word
Wildness
Men
Society
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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The press is, almost without exception, corrupt.
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It must be confessed that horses at present work too exclusively for men, rarely men for horses and the brute degenerates in man's society.
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The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality the best of the Hindoo Scripture, for its pure intellectuality. The readeris nowhere raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagvat-Geeta.... It is unquestionably one of the noblest and most sacred scriptures which have come down to us.
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Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever.
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The man who does not betake himself at once and desperately to sawing is called a loafer, though he may be knocking at the doors of heaven all the while.
Henry David Thoreau
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That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.
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I do not wish, it happens, to be associated with Massachusetts, either in holding slaves or in conquering Mexico. I am a little better than herself in these respects.
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I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings.
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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 prosaic man sees things badly, or with the bodily sense but the poet sees them clad in beauty, with the spiritual sense.
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If men were to be destroyed and the books they have written were to be transmitted to a new race of creatures, in a new world, what kind of record would be found in them of so remarkable a phenomenon as the rainbow?
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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.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.
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The oldest, wisest politician grows not more human so, but is merely a gray wharf rat at last.
Henry David Thoreau
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How many things are now at loose ends! Who knows which way the wind will blow tomorrow?
Henry David Thoreau
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The truth is, there is money buried everywhere, and you have only to go to work to find it.
Henry David Thoreau
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The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
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Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any rocks at least as well covered with lichens,and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome or Greece, Etruria or Carthage, or Egypt or Babylon, on these are our cliffs bare?
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I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada, not having seen much what I got by going to Canada was a cold.
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The United States have a coffle of four millions of slaves. They are determined to keep them in this condition and Massachusettsis one of the confederated overseers to prevent their escape.
Henry David Thoreau