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I do not know what right I have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in reserve till the time of my desert.

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
Desert
Till
Hold
Happiness
Rather
Right
Much
Reserve
Time
Reserves

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We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.
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Our thoughts are epochs in our lives all else is but as a journal of the winds that blow while we are here.
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be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else's idea of yourself should be.
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Live the life you've dreamed.
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No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes: yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.
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Heal yourselves, doctors by God I live.
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Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.
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Only nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not.
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Things don't change. We change.
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The still youthful energies of the globe have only to be directed in their proper channel.
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I do not wish, it happens, to be associated with Massachusetts, either in holding slaves or in conquering Mexico. I am a little better than herself in these respects.
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God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.
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I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.
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Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.
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We have reason to be grateful for celestial phenomena, for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man.
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Many, no doubt, are well disposed, but sluggish by constitution and habit, and they cannot conceive of a man who is actuated by higher motives than they are. Accordingly they pronounce this man insane, for they know that they could never act as he does, as long as they are themselves.
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How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.
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The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate the world....There is naked Nature, inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.
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Whatever beauty we behold, the more it is distant, serene, and cold, the purer and more durable it is. It is better to warm ourselves with ice than with fire.
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While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
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