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The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.
Henry David Thoreau
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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
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Naturalist
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Mankind
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work.
Henry David Thoreau
We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defenses only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free.
Henry David Thoreau
How many things are now at loose ends! Who knows which way the wind will blow tomorrow?
Henry David Thoreau
Did ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them - that it was a vain endeavor?
Henry David Thoreau
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old return to them. Things do not change we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.
Henry David Thoreau
When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left.
Henry David Thoreau
One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something.
Henry David Thoreau
Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe.
Henry David Thoreau
The man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.
Henry David Thoreau
I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.
Henry David Thoreau
The inhabitants of earth behold commonly but the dark and shadowy under side of heaven's pavement it is only when seen at a favorable angle in the horizon, morning or evening, that some faint streaks of the rich lining of the clouds are revealed.
Henry David Thoreau
Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts who stood their ground.
Henry David Thoreau
The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea.
Henry David Thoreau
In 1848, Thoreau went to jail for refusing, as a protest against the Mexican war, to pay his poll tax. When RW Emerson came to bail him out, Emerson said, 'Henry, what are you doing in there?' Thoreau quietly replied, 'Ralph, what are you doing out there?'
Henry David Thoreau
A man may acquire a taste for wine or brandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him.
Henry David Thoreau
I have a room all to myself it is nature.
Henry David Thoreau
I have never met with a friend who furnished me sea-room. I have only tacked a few times and come to anchor - not sailed - made no voyage, carried no venture.
Henry David Thoreau
The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindu, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich inward.
Henry David Thoreau
Let the beautiful laws prevail. Let us not weary ourselves by resisting them.
Henry David Thoreau
We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,--at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene their sunny lives onthe sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.
Henry David Thoreau
