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Though the hen should sit all day, she could lay only one egg, and, besides, would not have picked up materials for another.
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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Autobiographer
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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Though
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it.
Henry David Thoreau
See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
Henry David Thoreau
Nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow. She seems not to have provided for, but by a thousand contrivances against it.
Henry David Thoreau
No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher.
Henry David Thoreau
It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador a greater wildness than in some recess of Concord.
Henry David Thoreau
All good things are cheap: all bad are very dear.
Henry David Thoreau
We are all of us Apollos serving some Admetus.
Henry David Thoreau
It is the stars as not yet known to science that I would know, the stars which the lonely traveler knows.
Henry David Thoreau
It is tranquil people who accomplish much.
Henry David Thoreau
We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.
Henry David Thoreau
The kindness I have longest remembered has been of this sort, the sort unsaid so far behind the speaker's lips that almost it already lay in my heart. It did not have far to go to be communicated.
Henry David Thoreau
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
Henry David Thoreau
Left to herself, nature is always more or less civilized, and delights in a certain refinement but where the axe has encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had concealed with green banks of verdure, are exposed to sight.
Henry David Thoreau
You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.
Henry David Thoreau
If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.
Henry David Thoreau
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
The richest gifts we can bestow are the least marketable. We hate the kindness which we understand.
Henry David Thoreau
I hear beyond the range of sound, I see beyond the range of sight, New earths and skies and seas around, And in my day the sun doth pale his light.
Henry David Thoreau
When the first light dawned on the earth, and the birds awoke, and the brave river was heard rippling confidently seaward, and the nimble early rising wind rustled the oak leaves about our tent, all people, having reinforced their bodies and their souls with sleep, and cast aside doubt and fear, were invited to unattempted adventures.
Henry David Thoreau
I have travelled a good deal in Concord.
Henry David Thoreau
