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Every ambitious would-be empire, clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and it is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it.

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

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Improve every opportunity to be melancholy.
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The same soil is good for men and for trees. A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck.
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One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.
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I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too much patience of this kind.
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The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize or are fertilized. It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination...without nature-awakened imagination most persons do not really live in the world, they merely pass through it as they live dull lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
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What is human warfare but just this an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
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The man who does not betake himself at once and desperately to sawing is called a loafer, though he may be knocking at the doors of heaven all the while.
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If Columbus was the first to discover the islands, Americus Vespucius and Cabot, and the Puritans, and we their descendants, havediscovered only the shores of America.
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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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We make needless ado about capital punishment,--taking lives, when there is no life to take.
Henry David Thoreau
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The books for young people say a great deal about the selection of Friends it is because they really have nothing to say about Friends. They mean associates and confidants merely.
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The perception of beauty is a moral test.
Henry David Thoreau
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The law will never make a man free it is men who have got to make the law free.
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Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
Henry David Thoreau
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The young pines springing up in the corn-fields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact.
Henry David Thoreau
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Read not the Times, read the Eternities.
Henry David Thoreau
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No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes: yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.
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I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.
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The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast- off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.
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The most alive is the wildest.
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