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The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover it was never fish that you were after.
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
Greatest
Whole
Never
Fishing
Life
Fish
Fishes
Discover
Tragedy
Spend
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth
Henry David Thoreau
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
Henry David Thoreau
There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.
Henry David Thoreau
Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.
Henry David Thoreau
If we dealt only with the false and dishonest, we should at last forget how to speak truth.
Henry David Thoreau
Do not despair of life. You have no doubt force enough to overcome your obstacles. Think of the fox prowling through wood and field in a winter night for something to satisfy his hunger. Notwithstanding cold and the hounds and traps, his race survives. I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.
Henry David Thoreau
Our molting season, like that of the fouls, must be a crisis in our lives.
Henry David Thoreau
Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.
Henry David Thoreau
If we cannot sing of faith and triumph, we will sing our despair. We will be that kind of bird. There are day owls, and there arenight owls, and each is beautiful and even musical while about its business.
Henry David Thoreau
A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.
Henry David Thoreau
Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs.
Henry David Thoreau
A man sits as many risks as he runs.
Henry David Thoreau
Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men.
Henry David Thoreau
Whatever beauty we behold, the more it is distant, serene, and cold, the purer and more durable it is. It is better to warm ourselves with ice than with fire.
Henry David Thoreau
How can any man be weak who dares to be at all?
Henry David Thoreau
Every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition, has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food
Henry David Thoreau
Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons.
Henry David Thoreau
The sacredness, if there is any, is all in yourself and not in the place.
Henry David Thoreau
The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate the world....There is naked Nature, inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.
Henry David Thoreau
That is a pathetic inquiry among travelers and geographers after the site of ancient Troy. It is not near where they think it is.When a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be the place it occupied!
Henry David Thoreau
