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Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East -- to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them -- who were above such trifling.

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
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Writer
birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Days
Monuments
Part
Trifling
Many
Monument
Like
East
West
Build
Concerned
Built

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Read not the Times, read the Eternities.
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The wisest man preaches no doctrines he has no scheme he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky.
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When I meet a government which says to me, Your money or your life, why should I be in haste to give it my money?
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The higher the mountain on which you stand, the less change in the prospect from year to year, from age to age. Above a certain height there is no change.
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One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve.
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When any real progress is made, we unlearned and learn anew what we thought we knew before.
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It is not so important that many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere for that will leaven the whole lump.
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A Friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us.
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The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover it was never fish that you were after.
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To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
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What is called common sense is excellent in its department, and as invaluable as the virtue of conformity in the army and navy,--for there must be subordination,--but uncommon sense, that sense which is common only to the wisest, is as much more excellent as it is more rare.
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These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live. If this man's acts and words do not create a revival, it will be the severest possible satire on the acts and words that do. It is the best news that America has ever heard.... How many a man who was lately contemplating suicide has now something to live for!
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History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning ofthings, which natural history might with reason assume to do but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,--when did burdock and plantain sprout first?
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At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house.
Henry David Thoreau
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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.
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But what is quackery? It is commonly an attempt to cure the diseases of a man by addressing his body alone. There is need of a physician who shall minister to both soul and body at once, that is, to man. Now he falls between two stools.
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Nature is fair in proportion as the youth is pure. The heavens and the earth are one flower the earth is the calyx, the heavens the corolla.
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If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
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I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society.
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We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not.
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