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We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.

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
Earth
Nutriment
Gnaw
Crust
Ecology
Reduced
Civilization
Shall

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If it is the result of a pure love, there can be nothing sensual in marriage. Chastity is something positive, not negative. It isthe virtue of the married especially. All lusts or base pleasures must give place to loftier delights. They who meet as superior beings cannot perform the deeds of inferior ones.
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The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.
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Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.
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The mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible.
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We should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.
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What is human warfare but just this an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
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Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.
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What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then!
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I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.
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The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.
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The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.
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Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as we never were before in our lives, not by an opiate, but by some unconscious obedience to the all-just laws, so that we become like a still lake of purest crystal and without an effort our depths are revealed to ourselves. . . .
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The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man.
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A little thought is sexton to all the world.
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To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.
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