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Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.

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
Right
Poet
Verse
Much
Failing
Verses
Poetry
Fails
Written
Near
Though
Miracle
Inconceivably
Inspirational
Caught
Vaster
Thought
Crisis
Receding
May
Exactly
Hue

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The silence sings. It is musical. I remember a night when it was audible. I heard the unspeakable.
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For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men?
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I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
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If you're familiar with a principle you don't have to be familiar with all of its applications.
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We cannot well do without our sins they are the highway of our virtue.
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A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it.
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It is one of the signs of the times. We confess that we have risen from reading this book with enlarged ideas, and grander conceptions of our duties in this world. It did expand us a little.
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A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance.
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New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion.
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Life is grand, and so are its environments of Past and Future. Would the face of nature be so serene and beautiful if man's destiny were not equally so?
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The Library is a wilderness of books.
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The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.
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It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to their minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them off from their present pursuit.
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Though my life is low, if my spirit looks upward habitually at an elevated angle, it is as if it were redeemed. When the desire to be better than we are is really sincere we are instantly elevated, and so far better already.
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It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.
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Beside some philosophers of larger vision, Carlyle stands like an honest, half-despairing boy, grasping at some details only of their world systems.
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We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.
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It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
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We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.
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As long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, particeps criminis.
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