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The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.
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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Law
Superior
Freedom
Superiors
Live
God
Men
Relation
Laws
Virtue
Liberty
Lawmaker
Takes
Lawmakers
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
It is impossible to give a soldier a good education without making him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him.
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Sincerity is a great but rare virtue, and we pardon to it much complaining, and the betrayal of many weaknesses.
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You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land there is no other life but this.
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If you would be chaste, you must be temperate.
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As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.
Henry David Thoreau
There has always been the same amount of light in the world. The new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses, do not affect thegeneral illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them.
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We cannot well do without our sins they are the highway of our virtue.
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Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our Maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns.
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Be wary of technology it is often merely an improved means to an unimproved end.
Henry David Thoreau
It is remarkable that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or acknowledge the personality of God. Some Earl of Bridgewater, thinking it better late than never, has provided for it in his will. It is a sad mistake.
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I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.
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Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.
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I make it my business to extract from Nature what ever nutriment she can furnish me.... I milk the sky and the earth.
Henry David Thoreau
An unclean person is universally a slothful one.
Henry David Thoreau
We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we.
Henry David Thoreau
A true Friendship is as wise as it is tender. The parties to it yield implicitly to the guidance of their love, and know no otherlaw nor kindness.
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
When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?
Henry David Thoreau
When was it that men agreed to respect the appearance and not the reality?
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Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other.
Henry David Thoreau