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While some men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.

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
Men
Bottomless
Ponds
Infinite
Belief
Thought
Believe

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We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,--at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene their sunny lives onthe sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.
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All health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear all disease and failure helps to make me sad anddoes me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it.
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You don't know your testament when you see it.
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Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.
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Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much.
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A person who chooses to die or to risk death demonstrates that there are values, principles, maxims, that are more valuable to him than is life itself. In short, he places his immortal self above his mortal self. Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
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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.
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It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.
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The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
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The Oriental philosophy approaches easily loftier themes than the modern aspires to and no wonder if it sometimes prattle about them. It only assigns their due rank respectively to Action and Contemplation, or rather does full justice to the latter. Western philosophers have not conceived of the significance of Contemplation in their sense.
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In the unbending of the arm to do the deed there is experience worth all the maxims in the world.
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We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success. What we do best or most perfectly is what we have most thoroughly learned by the longest practice, and at length it falls from us without our notice, as a leaf from a tree.
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Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts who stood their ground.
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The most interesting thing which I heard of, in this township of Hull, was an unfailing spring, whose locality was pointed out tome on the side of a distant hill, as I was panting along the shore, though I did not visit it. Perhaps, if I should go through Rome, it would be some spring on the Capitoline Hill I should remember the longest.
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If I thought that I could speak with discrimination and impartiality of the nations of Christendom, I should praise them, but it tasks me too much. They seem to be the most civil and humane, but I may be mistaken.
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Every man is entitled to come to Cattle-Show, even a transcendentalist and for my part I am more interested in the men than in the cattle.
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The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
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A man can suffocate on courtesy.
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I make it my business to extract from Nature what ever nutriment she can furnish me.... I milk the sky and the earth.
Henry David Thoreau
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Live the life you've dreamed.
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