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The vessel, though her masts be firm,Beneath her copper bears a worm.

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
Vessel
Worms
Beneath
Firm
Bears
Though
Masts
Copper
Worm

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We slander the hyena man is the fiercest and cruelest animal.
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The young pines springing up in the corn-fields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact.
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The future is too soon the past. So make perseverance your excellence and go confidently in the direction of your dreams.
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It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.
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Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, - passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man's capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to!
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A journal is a repository for all those fragmentary ideas and odd scraps of information that might otherwise be lost and which some day might lead to more harmonious compositions.
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It is dry, hazy June weather. We are more of the earth, farther from heaven these days.
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I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor.
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With all your science can you tell me how it is, and when it is, that light comes into the soul?
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Men talk glibly enough about moonshine, as if they knew its qualities very well, and despised them as owls might talk of sunshine,--none of your sunshine!--but this word commonly means merely something which they do not understand,--which they are abed and asleep to, however much it may be worth their while to be up and awake to it.
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Being a teacher is like being in jail once it's on your record, you can never get rid of it.
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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.
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I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.
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The kindness I have longest remembered has been of this sort, the sort unsaid so far behind the speaker's lips that almost it already lay in my heart. It did not have far to go to be communicated.
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You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land there is no other life but this.
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Especially the transcendental philosophy needs the leaven of humor to render it light and digestible.
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The highest condition of art is artlessness.
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Whatever has not come under the sway of man is wild. In this sense original and independent men are wild - not tamed and broken by society.
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A sufficiently great and generous trust could never be abused.
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It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
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