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It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to their minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them off from their present pursuit.
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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Naturalist
Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defenses only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free.
Henry David Thoreau
He who is conversant with the supernal powers will not worship these inferior deities of the wind, waves, tide, and sunshine. Butwe would not disparage the importance of such calculations as we have described. They are truths in physics because they are true in ethics.
Henry David Thoreau
Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
Henry David Thoreau
The young pines springing up in the corn-fields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact.
Henry David Thoreau
Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau
The chief want, in every state that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants.
Henry David Thoreau
Then at night the general stillness is more impressive than any sound, but occasionally you hear the note of an owl farther or nearer in the woods, and if near a lake, the semihuman cry of the loons at their unearthly revels.
Henry David Thoreau
The universe expects every man to do his duty in his parallel of latitude.
Henry David Thoreau
A man cannot wheedle nor overawe his Genius. It requires to be conciliated by nobler conduct than the world demands or can appreciate.
Henry David Thoreau
If it is the result of a pure love, there can be nothing sensual in marriage. Chastity is something positive, not negative. It isthe virtue of the married especially. All lusts or base pleasures must give place to loftier delights. They who meet as superior beings cannot perform the deeds of inferior ones.
Henry David Thoreau
In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau
We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.
Henry David Thoreau
Bread may not always nourish us but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy.
Henry David Thoreau
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
All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.
Henry David Thoreau
What means the fact--which is so common, so universal--that some soul that has lost all hope for itself can inspire in another listening soul an infinite confidence in it, even while it is expressing its despair?
Henry David Thoreau
Why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse?
Henry David Thoreau
In their daily life, all are braver than they know.
Henry David Thoreau
That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.
Henry David Thoreau
Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.
Henry David Thoreau
