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Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Men were born to succeed, not to fail.
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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Despair
Succeed
Failing
Born
Postponement
Men
Procrastination
Cowardice
Defeat
Fail
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.
Henry David Thoreau
Give me the old familiar world, post-office and all, with this ever new self, with this infinite expectation and faith, which does not know when it is beaten.
Henry David Thoreau
One revelation has been made to the Indian, another to the white man.
Henry David Thoreau
Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open.
Henry David Thoreau
The violence of love is as much to be dreaded as that of hate.
Henry David Thoreau
Some creatures are made to see in the dark.
Henry David Thoreau
What is wanted is men of principle, who recognize a higher law than the decision of the majority. The marines and the militia whose bodies were used lately were not men of sense nor of principle in a high moral sense they were not men at all.
Henry David Thoreau
One is wise to cultivate the tree that bears fruit in our soul.
Henry David Thoreau
Real power is measured by how much you can let things be.
Henry David Thoreau
Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs.
Henry David Thoreau
I love the broad margin to my life.
Henry David Thoreau
Most people dread finding out when they come to die that they have never really lived.
Henry David Thoreau
If the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success.
Henry David Thoreau
At death our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart farther from us and are forgotten. Friends are as often brought nearer together as separated by death.
Henry David Thoreau
Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.
Henry David Thoreau
When I would go a-visiting, I find that I go off the fashionable street,--not being inclined to change my dress,--to where man meets man, and not polished shoe meets shoe.
Henry David Thoreau
The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!
Henry David Thoreau
The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils.
Henry David Thoreau
Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic, and his trappings will have to serve that mood too.
Henry David Thoreau
Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.
Henry David Thoreau