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If we cannot sing of faith and triumph, we will sing our despair. We will be that kind of bird. There are day owls, and there arenight owls, and each is beautiful and even musical while about its business.

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
Kind
Sing
Musical
Bird
Faith
Business
Owls
Beautiful
Owl
Cannot
Triumph
Even
Despair

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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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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The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers.
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Keep up the fires of thought, and all will go well.
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Perfect sincerity and transparency make a great part of beauty, as in dewdrops, lakes, and diamonds.
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A journal is a repository for all those fragmentary ideas and odd scraps of information that might otherwise be lost and which some day might lead to more harmonious compositions.
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In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.
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Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.
Henry David Thoreau
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We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which came and went on the western sky, and the mother-o'-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there.
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If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, But what shall I do? my answer is, If you really wish to do anything, resign your office. When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.
Henry David Thoreau
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The most stupendous scenery ceases to be sublime when it becomes distinct, or in other words limited, and the imagination is no longer encouraged to exaggerate it. The actual height and breadth of a mountain or a waterfall are always ridiculously small they are the imagined only that content us.
Henry David Thoreau
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I never yet knew the sun to be knocked down and rolled through a mud-puddle he comes out honor-bright from behind every storm. Let us then take sides with the sun, seeing we have so much leisure.
Henry David Thoreau
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I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.
Henry David Thoreau
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Every sunset I witness inspires me with the desire to go to West as distant and as fair as that which the sun goes down. Eastward I go only by force but westward I go free.
Henry David Thoreau
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The genuine remains of Ossian, or those ancient poems which bear his name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects,of the same stamp with the Iliad itself. He asserts the dignity of the bard no less than Homer, and in his era, we hear of no other priest than he.
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The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize or are fertilized. It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination...without nature-awakened imagination most persons do not really live in the world, they merely pass through it as they live dull lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
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The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.
Henry David Thoreau
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Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics.
Henry David Thoreau
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I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account.
Henry David Thoreau
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Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.
Henry David Thoreau
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He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and extract a motive power out of the greatest obstacles. Most begin to veer and tack as soon as the wind changes from aft, and as within the tropics it does not blow from all points of the compass, there are some harbors which they can never reach.
Henry David Thoreau