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It is not when I am going to meet him, but when I am just turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover what God is. I say, God. I am not sure that that is the name. You will know what I mean.

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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Away
Discover
Mean
God
Going
Leaving
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Name
Alone
Names
Sure
Turning

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Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic, and his trappings will have to serve that mood too.
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Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green.
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I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
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I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men. The former are so much the freer.
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Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man's morning work in this world?
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Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.
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The most alive is the wildest.
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I think of no news to tell you. It is a serene summer day here, all above the snow. The hens steal their nests, and I steal theireggs still, as formerly. This is what I do with the hands. Ah, labor,--it is a divine institution, and conversation with many men and hens.
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Morning brings back the heroic ages.
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Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors,--why the judge does not dismiss his case,--why the preacher does not dismisshis congregation! It is because they do not obey the hint God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all.
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We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake.
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What is wanted is men of principle, who recognize a higher law than the decision of the majority. The marines and the militia whose bodies were used lately were not men of sense nor of principle in a high moral sense they were not men at all.
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Every ambitious would-be empire, clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and it is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it.
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How shall we account for our pursuits, if they are original? We get the language with which to describe our various lives out of acommon mint.
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Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, - passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man's capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to!
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The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.
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It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
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The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.
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What a fool he must be who thinks that his El Dorado is anywhere but where he lives.
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