Quote

A temple, you know, was anciently an open place without a roof, whose walls served merely to shut out the world and direct the mind toward heaven but a modern meeting-house shuts out the heavens, while it crowds the world into still closer quarters.

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
Place
Toward
Walls
Protestantism
Stills
Whose
Meeting
Shuts
Still
Wall
Closer
Heavens
Without
Modern
Shut
Temple
Mind
Open
Crowds
Served
World
Heaven
Meetings
Quarters
Religion
Merely
Roof
House
Direct
Temples
Anciently

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In the long run, we only hit what we aim at.
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I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.
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There is one thought for the field, another for the house. I would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted in the house.
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We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.
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To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.
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We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.
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Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours and yet how long it stands in vain!... Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.
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Let us not play at kittly-benders. There is a solid bottom everywhere.
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I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.
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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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People seldom hit what they do not aim at.
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A fact may blossom into a truth.
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Fishing has been styled 'a contemplative man's recreation,' ... and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation.
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Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
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There may be something petty in a refined taste it easily degenerates into effeminacy. It does not consider the broadest use. It is not content with simple good and bad, and so is fastidious and curious or nice only.
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A strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man's door, and utter their complaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it.
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