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Men do not fail commonly for want of knowledge, but for want of prudence to give wisdom the preference.

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
Preference
Fail
Failing
Wisdom
Knowledge
Give
Giving
Commonly
Men
Prudence

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Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.
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I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot.
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A stranger may easily detect what is strange to the oldest inhabitant, for the strange is his province.
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For things to change, we must change.
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Books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined.
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I am engaged to Concord and my own private pursuits by 10,000 ties, and it would be suicide to rend them.
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Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.
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Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.
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Oh to reach the point of death and realize one has not lived at all.
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However much we admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or abovethe fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds.
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A man's interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.
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The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor
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Sell your clothes- keep your thoughts.
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Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary.
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We can never have enough of Nature.
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I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least - and it is commonly more than that - sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.
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Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?
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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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A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority it is not even a minority then but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.
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All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity.
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