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Men spend the best parts of their lives earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of 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
Diarist
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Poet
Translator
Writer
birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Lives
Earning
Money
Independence
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Valuable
Part
Parts
Best
Spend
Men
Liberty
Least
Enjoy
Questionable

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Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?
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If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life.
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The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity.
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We are older by faith than by experience.
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However mean your life is, meet it and live it do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.
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I have much to learn of the Indian, nothing of the missionary.
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No people ever lived by cursing their fathers, however great a curse their fathers might have been to them.
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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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All that is told of the sea has a fabulous sound to an inhabitant of the land and all its products have a certain fabulous quality, as if they belonged to another planet.
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Always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary.
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We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.
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We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.
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Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours and yet how long it stands in vain!... Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.
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Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion,--as if the short spring days were an eternity.
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This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge... It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature.
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The United States have a coffle of four millions of slaves. They are determined to keep them in this condition and Massachusettsis one of the confederated overseers to prevent their escape.
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It is the man determines what is said, not the words.
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The silence sings. It is musical. I remember a night when it was audible. I heard the unspeakable.
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When the State wishes to endow an academy or university, it grants it a tract of forest land: one saw represents an academy, a gang, a university.
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A temple, you know, was anciently an open place without a roof, whose walls served merely to shut out the world and direct the mind toward heaven but a modern meeting-house shuts out the heavens, while it crowds the world into still closer quarters.
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