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Every man will be a poet if he can otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.

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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Autobiographer
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
Henry David Thoreau
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I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.
Henry David Thoreau
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I do not know what right I have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in reserve till the time of my desert.
Henry David Thoreau
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The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality the best of the Hindoo Scripture, for its pure intellectuality. The readeris nowhere raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagvat-Geeta.... It is unquestionably one of the noblest and most sacred scriptures which have come down to us.
Henry David Thoreau
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In order to die, you must first have lived.
Henry David Thoreau
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How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau
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The only government that I recognize--and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army--is that power thatestablishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice.
Henry David Thoreau
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Friends will be much apart. They will respect more each other's privacy than their communion.
Henry David Thoreau
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Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.
Henry David Thoreau
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Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. Why, nature is but another name for health.
Henry David Thoreau
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Shall a man not have his spring as well as the plants?
Henry David Thoreau
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We could not help contrasting the equanimity of Nature with the bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume alwaysa crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending.
Henry David Thoreau
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Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
Henry David Thoreau
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So long as a man is faithful to himself, everything is in his favor, government, society, the very sun, moon, and stars.
Henry David Thoreau
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A man of fine perceptions is more truly feminine than a merely sentimental woman.
Henry David Thoreau
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There are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or inlet, yet unexplored by him.
Henry David Thoreau
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When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.
Henry David Thoreau
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Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.
Henry David Thoreau
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But the place which you have selected for your camp, though never so rough and grim, begins at once to have its attractions, and becomes a very centre of civilization to you: Home is home, be it never so homely.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
Henry David Thoreau