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I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly.

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
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Men
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In the religion of all nations a purity is hinted at, which, I fear, men never attain to.
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Let your walks now be a little more adventurous.
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Spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.
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We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice.
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Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours and yet how long it stands in vain!... Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.
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Not till we are completely lost, or turned round, do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.
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I wished only to be set down in Canada, and take one honest walk there as I might in Concord woods of an afternoon.
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The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes their widest deductions.
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A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!
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The front aspect of great thoughts can only be enjoyed by those who stand on the side whence they arrive.
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Life is grand, and so are its environments of Past and Future. Would the face of nature be so serene and beautiful if man's destiny were not equally so?
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We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect. [So why not suspect good rather than bad in events, people and life and thereby find it more?]
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Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up.
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Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.
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Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever.
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One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something.
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No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher.
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The same soil is good for men and for trees. A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck.
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Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.
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We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
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