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It is equally impossible to forget our Friends, and to make them answer to our ideal. When they say farewell, then indeed we beginto keep them company. How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual Friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.

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
May
Meet
Turning
Find
Answers
Actual
Make
Impossible
Ideal
Company
Ideals
Cousins
Friends
Indeed
Backs
Forget
Perfection
Farewell
Often
Friendship
Cousin
Keep
Answer
Equally

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This life we live is a strange dream, and I don't believe at all any account men give of it.
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The lover wants no partiality. He says, Be so kind as to be just.
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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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They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.
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It would be worth the while if in each town there were a committee appointed to see that the beauty of the town received no detriment. If we have the largest boulder in the county, then it should not belong to an individual, nor be made into door-steps.
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I think that Nature meant kindly when she made our brothers few. However, my voice is still for peace.
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Though the hen should sit all day, she could lay only one egg, and, besides, would not have picked up materials for another.
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There is no just and serene criticism as yet.
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I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.
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Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.
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God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator.
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I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of a coarse jest, yet when you speak earnestly and seriously on the subject, is silent.
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To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a fountain of health.
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If the work is high and far, You must not only aim aright, But draw the bow with all your might.
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The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.
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The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes their widest deductions.
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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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