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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
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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
When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable.
Henry David Thoreau
I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly.
Henry David Thoreau
There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a hearing of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.
Henry David Thoreau
A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.
Henry David Thoreau
Do what you love. Know your own bone gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
Henry David Thoreau
I love a life whose plot is simple.
Henry David Thoreau
The husbandman is always a better Greek than the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in commemorating it.
Henry David Thoreau
One man lies in his words, and gets a bad reputation another in his manners, and enjoys a good one.
Henry David Thoreau
Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of.
Henry David Thoreau
Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
Henry David Thoreau
Heaven is not one of your fertile Ohio bottoms, you may depend on it.
Henry David Thoreau
Beware of any profession for which you must buy new clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
Our science, so called, is always more barren and mixed with error than our sympathies.
Henry David Thoreau
It is the man determines what is said, not the words.
Henry David Thoreau
Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe.
Henry David Thoreau
If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends!
Henry David Thoreau
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
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.
Henry David Thoreau
If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui.
Henry David Thoreau
One revelation has been made to the Indian, another to the white man.
Henry David Thoreau
