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Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.

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
Think
Violence
Mistaken
Bullet
Thinking
Greater
Composition
Gentlemen
Simple
Editors
Grammar
Egregiously
Force
Literary
Masterpiece
Masterpieces
Write
Gentleman
Infinitely
Rifle
Action
Critics
Bullets
Imply
Art
Behinds
Rhetoric
Discharge
Writing
Behind
Studied
Rifles

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All questions rely on the present for their solution. Time measures nothing but itself. The word that is written may be postponed,but not that on the lip. If this is what the occasion says, let the occasion say it.
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To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.
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Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know.
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I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits they are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, will be fixture enough.
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After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.
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Man is but the place where I stand.
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Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life ... would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.
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When the State wishes to endow an academy or university, it grants it a tract of forest land: one saw represents an academy, a gang, a university.
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If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
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If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui.
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A traveler who looks at things with an impartial eye may see what the oldest inhabitant has not observed.
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I did not go to Boston, for with regard to that place I sympathize with one of my neighbors, an old man, who has not been there since the last war, when he was compelled to go. No, I have a real genius for staying at home.
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In order to die, you must first have lived.
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WE begin to die not in our sense or extremities, but in our divine faculties.
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Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towardsrecognizing and organizing the rights of man?
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By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.
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There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.
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