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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
Discover
Tragedy
Spend
Greatest
Whole
Never
Fishing
Life
Fish
Fishes

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I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.
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The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.
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All the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of thewords by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already supernatural philosophy.
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It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always. The conscience really does not, and ought not to monopolizethe whole of our lives, any more than the heart or the head. It is as liable to disease as any other part.
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No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
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So near along life's stream are the fountains of innocence and youth making fertile its sandy margin and the voyageur will do well to replenish his vessels often at these uncontaminated sources.
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We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.
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Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
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Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and through her, God.
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My desire for knowledge is intermittent but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.
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What is the singing of birds, or any natural sound, compared with the voice of one we love.
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It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination
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If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.
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The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.
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I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
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I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known.
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What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and sublimest truth?
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How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my everyday business. I am as busy as a bee about it. I ramble over fields on that errand and am never so happy as when I feel myself heavy with honey and wax. I am like a bee searching the livelong day for the sweets of nature.
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A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject of the Turkish government.
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We are all of us Apollos serving some Admetus.
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