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It is a momentous fact that a man may be good, or he may be bad his life may be true, or it may be false it may be either a shame or a glory to him. The good man builds himself up the bad man destroys himself.
Henry David Thoreau
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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
It is but too easy to establish another durable and harmonious routine. Immediately all parts of nature consent to it. Only make something to take the place of something, and men will behave as if it was the very thing they wanted.
Henry David Thoreau
You must get your living by loving, or at least half your life is a failure.
Henry David Thoreau
Sometimes you have to leave the world in order to learn how to live in it. Thoreau shunned society, went to the woods, and came back with a new understanding of life.
Henry David Thoreau
Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature -if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you -know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.
Henry David Thoreau
The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee.
Henry David Thoreau
History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning ofthings, which natural history might with reason assume to do but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,--when did burdock and plantain sprout first?
Henry David Thoreau
In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.
Henry David Thoreau
It is a great pleasure to escape sometimes from the restless class of Reformers. What if these grievances exist? So do you and I.
Henry David Thoreau
I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.
Henry David Thoreau
My desire for knowledge is intermittent but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.
Henry David Thoreau
While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.
Henry David Thoreau
Simplify your life. Don't waste the years struggling for things that are unimportant. Don't burden yourself with possessions. Keep your needs and wants simple and enjoy what you have. Don't destroy your peace of mind by looking back, worrying about the past. Live in the present. Simplify!
Henry David Thoreau
Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
Henry David Thoreau
They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy evil, that they may no longer have have it to regret.
Henry David Thoreau
It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ.
Henry David Thoreau
There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.
Henry David Thoreau
Let us consider under what disadvantages Science has hitherto labored before we pronounce thus confidently on her progress.
Henry David Thoreau
The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.
Henry David Thoreau
Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.
Henry David Thoreau
The only way to speak the truth is to speak lovingly.
Henry David Thoreau