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The experience of every past moment but belies the faith of each present.

Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
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Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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Some would find fault with the morning, if they ever got up early enough.. The fault find faults even in Paradise.
Henry David Thoreau
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The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering for want of society. Was never a case like it. First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it was indigestion of the society I got.
Henry David Thoreau
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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.
Henry David Thoreau
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The only fruit which even much living yields seems to be often only some trivial success,--the ability to do some slight thing better. We make conquest only of husks and shells for the most part,--at least apparently,--but sometimes these are cinnamon and spices, you know.
Henry David Thoreau
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The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate the world....There is naked Nature, inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.
Henry David Thoreau
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I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
Henry David Thoreau
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So is the English Parliament provincial. Mere country bumpkins, they betray themselves, when any more important question arises for them to settle, the Irish question, for instance,--the English question why did I not say? Their natures are subdued to what they work in. Their good breeding respects only secondary objects.
Henry David Thoreau
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The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?
Henry David Thoreau
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It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
Henry David Thoreau
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A journal is a repository for all those fragmentary ideas and odd scraps of information that might otherwise be lost and which some day might lead to more harmonious compositions.
Henry David Thoreau
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Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.
Henry David Thoreau
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The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover it was never fish that you were after.
Henry David Thoreau
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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.
Henry David Thoreau
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That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.
Henry David Thoreau
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A strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man's door, and utter their complaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it.
Henry David Thoreau
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Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
Henry David Thoreau
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All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.
Henry David Thoreau
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Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.
Henry David Thoreau
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Whatever we leave to God, God does and blesses us.
Henry David Thoreau
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If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.
Henry David Thoreau