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For my own part, I commonly attend more to nature than to man, but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent.

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
Writer
birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Still
Objects
Routine
Detected
May
Events
Surprised
Affecting
Persons
Eyes
Event
Absorbed
Human
Eye
Observation
Commonly
Humans
Natural
Affair
Attend
Going
Nature
Whenever
Surviving
Men
Stills
Mets
Indifferent
World
Part
Blind
Affairs

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I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
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Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travelers may see only a gap in the paling. His solitary path across lots will turn out the higher way of the two.
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Verily, chemistry is not a splitting of hairs when you have got half a dozen raw Irishmen in the laboratory.
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What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation!
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However mean your life is, meet it and live it do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are.
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Eastward I go only by force but westward I go free.
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Justice is sweet and musical but injustice is harsh and discordant.
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The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
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It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws.
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I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too much patience of this kind.
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In the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn.
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To be awake is to be alive.
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But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constantand imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.
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May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!
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When a shadow flits across the landscape of the soul where is the substance?
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The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.
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Especially the transcendental philosophy needs the leaven of humor to render it light and digestible.
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Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk.
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Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
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I am a citizen of the world first, and of this country at a later and more convenient hour.
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