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A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!

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
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Poet
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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Sees
Naturalist
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Much
Poet
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Mind
Objects
Differently
Men
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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No doubt another may also think for me but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
Henry David Thoreau
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I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.
Henry David Thoreau
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How little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. They insult nature. Every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws.
Henry David Thoreau
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Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any rocks at least as well covered with lichens,and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome or Greece, Etruria or Carthage, or Egypt or Babylon, on these are our cliffs bare?
Henry David Thoreau
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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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In all perception of the truth there is a divine ecstasy, an inexpressible delirium of joy, as when a youth embraces his betrothed virgin.
Henry David Thoreau
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A Friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us.
Henry David Thoreau
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All endeavour calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil.
Henry David Thoreau
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Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her.
Henry David Thoreau
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Where is the unexplored land but in our own untried enterprises? To an adventurous spirit any place--London, New York, Worcester, or his own yard--is unexplored land, to seek which Frémont and Kane travel so far. To a sluggish and defeated spirit even the Great Basin and the Polaris are trivial places.
Henry David Thoreau
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That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.
Henry David Thoreau
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I already, and for weeks afterward, felt my nature the coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was reminded that ourlife should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower.
Henry David Thoreau
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Some simple dishes recommend themselves to our imaginations as well as palates.
Henry David Thoreau
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Tough times don't last but tough people do. No matter how slow you go, you are still lapping everybody on the couch. Men are born to succeed, not fail.
Henry David Thoreau
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One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in.
Henry David Thoreau
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We have reason to be grateful for celestial phenomena, for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man.
Henry David Thoreau
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Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and through her, God.
Henry David Thoreau
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Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.
Henry David Thoreau
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I have traveled a good deal in Concord and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.
Henry David Thoreau
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Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.
Henry David Thoreau