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Since you are my readers, and I have not been much of a traveler, I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism.

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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Time
Thousand
Flattery
People
Leave
Traveler
Since
Readers
Talk
Near
Reading
Miles
Home
Criticism
Come
Reader
Much
Short
Retain

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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Morning brings back the heroic ages.
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We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.
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Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open.
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Let go of the past and live the future . . . Live the life you imagined.
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We bless and curse ourselves.
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We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
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A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.
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Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
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It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living: how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious for if getting a living is not so, then living is not.
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All nations love the same jests and tales, Jews, Christians, and Mahometans, and the same translated suffice for all.
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The world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand within it.
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Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know.
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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.
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I do not believe there are eight hundred human beings on the globe.
Henry David Thoreau
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I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority? Would you have had him wait till that time came?--till you and I came over to him?
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It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.
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I was determined to know beans.
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No man's thoughts are new, but the style of their expression is the never-failing novelty which cheers and refreshes men. If we were to answer the question, whether the mass of men, as we know them, talk as the standard authors and reviewers write, or rather as this man writes, we should say that he alone begins to write their language at all.
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In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts.
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I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks.
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