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Undoubtedly, in the most brilliant successes, the first rank is always sacrificed.

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
Brilliant
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War
Firsts
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Undoubtedly
Always
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor.
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Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savagestands on the unelastic plank of famine.
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Between whom there is hearty truth there is love.
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When we are in health, all sounds fife and drum for us we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn.
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It is strange to talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.
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Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.
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Much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no character.
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In the summer we lay up a stock of experiences for the winter, as the squirrel of nuts?something for conversation in winter evenings.
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If you will not try, you will go to your grave with your song still inside you.
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How many fine thoughts has every man had! How few fine thoughts are expressed!
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One may be drunk with love without being any nearer to finding his mate.
Henry David Thoreau
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Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.
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The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile,... the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world.
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There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.
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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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The question is not what you look at – but how you look & whether you see.
Henry David Thoreau
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The mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible.
Henry David Thoreau
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Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion,--as if the short spring days were an eternity.
Henry David Thoreau
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Unless the human race perspire more than I do, there is no occasion to live by the sweat of their brow. If men cannot get on without money (the smallest amount will suffice), the truest method of earning it is by working as a laborer at one dollar per day. You are least dependent so I speak as an expert, having used several kinds of labor.
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The most interesting thing which I heard of, in this township of Hull, was an unfailing spring, whose locality was pointed out tome on the side of a distant hill, as I was panting along the shore, though I did not visit it. Perhaps, if I should go through Rome, it would be some spring on the Capitoline Hill I should remember the longest.
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