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Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.

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
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind.
Henry David Thoreau
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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.
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All the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of thewords by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already supernatural philosophy.
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I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
Henry David Thoreau
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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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The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man.
Henry David Thoreau
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The front aspect of great thoughts can only be enjoyed by those who stand on the side whence they arrive.
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There are sure to be two prescriptions diametrically opposite.
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I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.
Henry David Thoreau
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The virtue of making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before does not begin to be superhuman.
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My eye is educated to discover anything on the ground, as chestnuts, etc. It is probably wholesomer to look at the ground much than at the heavens.
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In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.
Henry David Thoreau
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I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves.
Henry David Thoreau
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Music never stops it is only the listening that is intermittent.
Henry David Thoreau
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Tough times don't last but tough people do. No matter how slow you go, you are still lapping everybody on the couch. Men are born to succeed, not fail.
Henry David Thoreau
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When the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen.
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Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.
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There is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but the farthest east.
Henry David Thoreau
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If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
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It is but too easy to establish another durable and harmonious routine. Immediately all parts of nature consent to it. Only make something to take the place of something, and men will behave as if it was the very thing they wanted.
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