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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
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Writer
birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Keep
Answer
Equally
May
Meet
Turning
Find
Answers
Actual
Make
Impossible
Ideal
Company
Ideals
Cousins
Friends
Indeed
Backs
Forget
Perfection
Farewell
Often
Friendship
Cousin

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What can be expressed in words can be expressed in life.
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What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation!
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The pleasures of the intellect are permanent, the pleasures of the heart are transitory.
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Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
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No man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. No man has the desire and the ability to work onhigh things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging.
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See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
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The true finish is the work of time, and the use to which a thing is put. The elements are still polishing the pyramids.
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Love your life, poor as it is.
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I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.
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The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.
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If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth
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If the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success.
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The voice of nature is always encouraging.
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Far travel, very far travel, or travail, comes near to the worth of staying at home.
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I love you not as something private and personal, which is my own, but as something universal and worthy of love which I have found.
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It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly, that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.
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Nature is an admirable schoolmistress.
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Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf Than that I may not disappoint myself, That in my action I may soar as high As I can now discern with this clear eye.
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