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If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

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
Truth
Give
Explain
Giving
Six
Years
Fame
Love
Year
Rather
Understand
Money

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limit of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced.
Henry David Thoreau
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Do not despair of life. You have no doubt force enough to overcome your obstacles. Think of the fox prowling through wood and field in a winter night for something to satisfy his hunger. Notwithstanding cold and the hounds and traps, his race survives. I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.
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You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint No Admittance on my gate.
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As all curves have reference to their centres or foci, so all beauty of character has reference to the soul, and is a graceful gesture of recognition or waving of the body toward it.
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Do not suffer your life to be taken by newspapers.
Henry David Thoreau
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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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Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.
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Birds never sing in caves.
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To the virtuous man, the universe is the only sanctum sanctorum, and the penetralia of the temple are the broad noon of his existence.
Henry David Thoreau
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Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
Henry David Thoreau
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He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behaviour as well as application.
Henry David Thoreau
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Sometimes you have to leave the world in order to learn how to live in it. Thoreau shunned society, went to the woods, and came back with a new understanding of life.
Henry David Thoreau
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I should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.
Henry David Thoreau
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We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.
Henry David Thoreau
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When I consider how, after sunset, the stars come out gradually in troops from behind the hills and woods, I confess that I could not have contrived a more curious and inspiring sight.
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Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.
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The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.
Henry David Thoreau
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Decay and disease are often beautiful, like the pearly tear of the shellfish and the hectic glow of consumption.
Henry David Thoreau