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To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.
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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Exaggeration
Small
Greater
Every
Men
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
I did not go to Boston, for with regard to that place I sympathize with one of my neighbors, an old man, who has not been there since the last war, when he was compelled to go. No, I have a real genius for staying at home.
Henry David Thoreau
There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.
Henry David Thoreau
The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more beautiful to live low and farehard in many respects and though I never did so, I went far enough to please my imagination.
Henry David Thoreau
Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone.
Henry David Thoreau
If Columbus was the first to discover the islands, Americus Vespucius and Cabot, and the Puritans, and we their descendants, havediscovered only the shores of America.
Henry David Thoreau
A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.
Henry David Thoreau
Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way.
Henry David Thoreau
The country is an archipelago of lakes,--the lake-country of New England.
Henry David Thoreau
As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
Henry David Thoreau
I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
Henry David Thoreau
You never gain something but that you lose something.
Henry David Thoreau
However mean your life is, meet it and live it do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are.
Henry David Thoreau
Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.
Henry David Thoreau
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
Henry David Thoreau
Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.
Henry David Thoreau
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
Henry David Thoreau
I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.
Henry David Thoreau
If I choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler.
Henry David Thoreau
It is a great pleasure to escape sometimes from the restless class of Reformers. What if these grievances exist? So do you and I.
Henry David Thoreau
The prosaic man sees things badly, or with the bodily sense but the poet sees them clad in beauty, with the spiritual sense.
Henry David Thoreau