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To live a better life,--this surely can be done.

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
Life
Surely
Reform
Morality
Better
Live
Done

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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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
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Friends are made for caring and sharing. Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.
Henry David Thoreau
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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
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I do not know what right I have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in reserve till the time of my desert.
Henry David Thoreau
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There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon.
Henry David Thoreau
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Water is a pioneer which the settler follows, taking advantage of its improvements.
Henry David Thoreau
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Instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.
Henry David Thoreau
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At least let us have healthy books.
Henry David Thoreau
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If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it.
Henry David Thoreau
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If I choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler.
Henry David Thoreau
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That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.
Henry David Thoreau
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Yet the New Testament treats of man and man's so-called spiritual affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to alone content me, who am not interested solely in man's religious or moral nature, or in man even.
Henry David Thoreau
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Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe.
Henry David Thoreau
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An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they were rarely disappointed.
Henry David Thoreau
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There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of expediency. There is no such thing as sliding up- hill.In morals the only sliders are backsliders.
Henry David Thoreau
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We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
Henry David Thoreau
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As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.
Henry David Thoreau
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What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and sublimest truth?
Henry David Thoreau
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There must be some nerve and heroism in our love, as of a winter morning.
Henry David Thoreau
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To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.
Henry David Thoreau