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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
Diarist
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Poet
Translator
Writer
birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
House
Next
Homeliness
Art
Abide
Book
Merit
Great
Reader
Would
Almost
Beauty
High

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One may be drunk with love without being any nearer to finding his mate.
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How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
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To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a fountain of health.
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Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.
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All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity.
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Wealth can't buy heath, but heath can buy wealth.
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Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind.
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You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally, the stuttering, blunderingclod-hopper that I am. Even poetry, you know, is in one sense an infinite brag and exaggeration. Not that I do not stand on all that I have written,--but what am I to the truth I feebly utter?
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We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice.
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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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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.
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To have made even one person's life a little better, that is to succeed.
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I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest. I lie and relie on the earth.
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One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve.
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The squeaking of the pump sounds as necessary as the music of the spheres.
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It would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run.
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Justice is sweet and musical but injustice is harsh and discordant.
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I think that Nature meant kindly when she made our brothers few. However, my voice is still for peace.
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The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.
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The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.
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