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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
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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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Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.
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Our circumstances answer to our expectations and the demand of our natures.
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Even Nature is observed to have her playful moods or aspects, of which man sometimes seems to be the sport.
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The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that hein some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages.
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The gods cannot misunderstand, man cannot explain.
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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.
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How little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. They insult nature. Every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws.
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That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.
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I have a great deal of company in my house especially in the morning, when nobody calls.
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I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen.
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The faultfinder will find faults even in paradise.
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Simplify, simplify, simplify.
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The fishermen say that the thundering of the pond scares the fishes and prevents their biting.
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All men are really most attracted by the beauty of plain speech, and they even write in a florid style in imitation of this. Theyprefer to be misunderstood rather than to come short of its exuberance.
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As in many countries precious metals belong to the crown, so here more precious natural objects of rare beauty should belong to the public.
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They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself.
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He who eats the fruit should at least plant the seed ay, if possible, a better seed than that whose fruit he has enjoyed.
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The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.
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