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The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality.

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
Knowledge
Gains
Forget
Easily
Values
Soon
Reality
Exist
Truth
Highest
Come
Progress
Greatest
Farthest
Doubt
Appreciated

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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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Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
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The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.
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I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
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I did not know that mankind was suffering for want of gold.
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Love your life, poor as it is.
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It will always be found that one flourishing institution exists and battens on another mouldering one. The Present itself is parasitic to this extent.
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Most people dread finding out when they come to die that they have never really lived.
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What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day?
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Men have become the tools of their tools.
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Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the works behind them, as they are battered down by the encroachments of time but while they loiter, they and their works both fall prey to the arch enemy.
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Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.
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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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Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.
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If you indulge in long periods, you must be sure to have a snapper at the end.
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Every man is entitled to come to Cattle-Show, even a transcendentalist and for my part I am more interested in the men than in the cattle.
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You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.
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Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.
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I think it would be worth the while to introduce a school of children to such [an oak grove], that they may get an idea of the primitive oaks before they are all gone, instead of hiring botanists to lecture to them when it is too late.
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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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