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The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.
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
Science
Defect
Credulity
Forgetfulness
Saddest
Habitual
Defects
Ignorance
Greatest
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.
Henry David Thoreau
A man of fine perceptions is more truly feminine than a merely sentimental woman.
Henry David Thoreau
A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man,--a denizen of the woods. The pale white man! I do not wonder that the African pitied him.
Henry David Thoreau
Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.
Henry David Thoreau
What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
Henry David Thoreau
Life isn't about finding yourself it's about creating yourself. So live the life you imagined.
Henry David Thoreau
It is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning.
Henry David Thoreau
I make my own time. I make my own terms. I cannot see how God or Nature can ever get the start of me.
Henry David Thoreau
It makes no odds where a man goes or stays, if he is only about his business.
Henry David Thoreau
Biography, too, is liable to the same objection it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am not I, who will be?
Henry David Thoreau
Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know.
Henry David Thoreau
What avails it that another loves you, if he does not understand you? Such love is a curse.
Henry David Thoreau
It is not worth while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.
Henry David Thoreau
The Library is a wilderness of books.
Henry David Thoreau
If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonal experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations.
Henry David Thoreau
A simple woman down in Tyngsborough, at whose house I once stopped to get a draught of water, when I said, recognizing the bucket, that I had stopped there nine years before for the same purpose, asked if I was not a traveler, supposing that I had been traveling ever since, and had now come round again.
Henry David Thoreau
Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be.
Henry David Thoreau
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.
Henry David Thoreau
The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.
Henry David Thoreau
The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact.
Henry David Thoreau
