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This fond reiteration of the oldest expressions of truth by the latest posterity, content with slightly and religiously retouchingthe old material, is the most impressive proof of a common humanity.
Henry David Thoreau
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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
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Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
The husbandman is always a better Greek than the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in commemorating it.
Henry David Thoreau
He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past
Henry David Thoreau
Books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined.
Henry David Thoreau
When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another.
Henry David Thoreau
I want the flower and fruit of a man that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse.
Henry David Thoreau
The fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter, and is about as ample at one season as at another. It is as well for cheerfulness as for warmth and dryness.
Henry David Thoreau
You never gain something but that you lose something.
Henry David Thoreau
Such were garrulous and noisy eras, which no longer yield any sound, but the Grecian or silent and melodious era is ever soundingand resounding in the ears of men.
Henry David Thoreau
Where is the unexplored land but in our own untried enterprises? To an adventurous spirit any place--London, New York, Worcester, or his own yard--is unexplored land, to seek which Frémont and Kane travel so far. To a sluggish and defeated spirit even the Great Basin and the Polaris are trivial places.
Henry David Thoreau
We need the tonic of the wilderness, to wade sometimes in the marsh where the bitten and the meadow hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.
Henry David Thoreau
For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men?
Henry David Thoreau
For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman... but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do.
Henry David Thoreau
The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.
Henry David Thoreau
Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid.
Henry David Thoreau
What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then!
Henry David Thoreau
Simplicity is the law of Nature for man as well as for flowers. When the tapestry (corolla) of the nuptial bed (calyx) is excessive, luxuriant, it is unproductive. The fertile flowers are single, not double.
Henry David Thoreau
It is tranquil people who accomplish much.
Henry David Thoreau
The Oriental philosophy approaches easily loftier themes than the modern aspires to and no wonder if it sometimes prattle about them. It only assigns their due rank respectively to Action and Contemplation, or rather does full justice to the latter. Western philosophers have not conceived of the significance of Contemplation in their sense.
Henry David Thoreau
Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?
Henry David Thoreau
Many old people receive pensions for no other reason, it seems to me, but as a compensation for having lived a long time ago.
Henry David Thoreau
