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The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body, in a sheltered place but man, having discovered fire, boxes up someair in a spacious apartment, and warms that.... Thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the fine arts.

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
Body
Goes
Bed
Spacious
Little
Fire
Instinct
Warms
Men
Animal
Thus
Sheltered
Time
Makes
Merely
Saves
Art
Step
Apartment
Place
Beyond
Boxes
Two
Steps
Arts
Littles
Fine
Discovered

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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Be resolutely and faithfully what you are be humbly what you aspire to be.
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Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travelers may see only a gap in the paling. His solitary path across lots will turn out the higher way of the two.
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Verily, chemistry is not a splitting of hairs when you have got half a dozen raw Irishmen in the laboratory.
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You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint No Admittance on my gate.
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One cannot too soon forget his errors and misdemeanors for to dwell long upon them is to add to the offense, and repentance and sorrow can only be displaced by somewhat better, and which is as free and original as if they had not been.
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The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do.
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For things to change, we must change.
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Simplify, simplify, simplify.
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To be awake is to be completely alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.
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I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot.
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The outward is only the outside of that which is within. Men are not concealed under habits, but are revealed by them they are their true clothes.
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We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.
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A man might well pray that he may not taboo or curse any portion of nature by being buried in it.
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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.
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Biography, too, is liable to the same objection it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am not I, who will be?
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What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation!
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It is no more dusky in ordinary nights than our mind's habitual atmosphere, and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminatedmoments are.
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I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor.
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Let your walks now be a little more adventurous.
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The front aspect of great thoughts can only be enjoyed by those who stand on the side whence they arrive.
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