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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.
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
Enough
Deeds
Swell
Men
Eternity
Bud
Time
Spring
Trivial
Short
Hurry
Days
Deed
Though
Moderation
Paring
Without
Nails
Imperceptibly
Take
Confusion
Buds
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.
Henry David Thoreau
When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a Sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.
Henry David Thoreau
Most men, it seems to me, do not care for Nature and would sell their share in all her beauty, as long as they may live, for a stated sum - many for a glass of rum. Thank God, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!
Henry David Thoreau
Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
Henry David Thoreau
Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.
Henry David Thoreau
The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast- off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.
Henry David Thoreau
Let us consider under what disadvantages Science has hitherto labored before we pronounce thus confidently on her progress.
Henry David Thoreau
Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body.
Henry David Thoreau
The man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when I wished to see himself.
Henry David Thoreau
If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.
Henry David Thoreau
Be not merely good. Be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau
I am accustomed to think very long of going anywhere,--am slow to move. I hope to hear a response of the oracle first.
Henry David Thoreau
What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own.
Henry David Thoreau
Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.
Henry David Thoreau
If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.
Henry David Thoreau
In the long run, we only hit what we aim at.
Henry David Thoreau
That grand old poem called Winter
Henry David Thoreau
