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If I thought that I could speak with discrimination and impartiality of the nations of Christendom, I should praise them, but it tasks me too much. They seem to be the most civil and humane, but I may be mistaken.

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
Much
Christianity
Impartiality
Civilization
Christendom
Seem
Humane
Nations
Mistaken
Speak
Discrimination
Thought
Civil
Seems
Tasks
May
Praise

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There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it.
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Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.
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Don't spend your time in drilling soldiers, who may turn out hirelings after all, but give to undrilled peasantry a country to fight for.
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Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic, and his trappings will have to serve that mood too.
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All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences.
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Sometimes you have to leave the world in order to learn how to live in it. Thoreau shunned society, went to the woods, and came back with a new understanding of life.
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Nature is goodness crystallized.
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We have reason to be grateful for celestial phenomena, for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man.
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In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.
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For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman... but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do.
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We have built for this world a family mansion, and the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.
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It is the man determines what is said, not the words.
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We admire Chaucer for his sturdy English wit.... But though it is full of good sense and humanity, it is not transcendent poetry.For picturesque description of persons it is, perhaps, without a parallel in English poetry yet it is essentially humorous, as the loftiest genius never is.
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Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.
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What an admirable training is science for the more active warfare of life! Indeed, the unchallenged bravery which these studies imply, is far more impressive than the trumpeted valor of the warrior.
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We are superior to the joy we experience.
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All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
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If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.
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The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
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I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
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