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I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.

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
Without
Noise
Repose
Ears
Reaches
Whose
Metal
Wall
Metals
Alloy
Often
Angle
Leaden
Littles
Bells
Contemporaries
Live
Composition
Poured
Little
Confused
Bell

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It makes no odds where a man goes or stays, if he is only about his business.
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At the extreme north, the voyagers are obliged to dance and act plays for employment.
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The oldest, wisest politician grows not more human so, but is merely a gray wharf rat at last.
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What avails it that another loves you, if he does not understand you? Such love is a curse.
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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?
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The gods are partial to no era, but steadily shines their light in the heavens, while the eye of the beholder is turned to stone.There was but the sun and the eye from the first. The ages have not added a new ray to the one, nor altered a fibre of the other.
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The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.
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All expression of truth does at length take this deep ethical form.
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Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys.
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There is one thought for the field, another for the house. I would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted in the house.
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The researcher is more memorable than the researched.
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What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then!
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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.
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My friend is one... who take me for what I am.
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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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There is such a thing as caste, even in the West but it is comparatively faint it is conservatism here. It says, forsake not your calling, outrage no institution, use no violence, rend no bonds the State is thy parent. Its virtue or manhood is wholly filial.
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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. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.
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Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.
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Nature has left nothing to the mercy of man.
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Faith, indeed, is all the reform that is needed it is itself a reform.
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