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Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are constantly being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.

Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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Every sentence is the result of a long probation.
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Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.
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Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
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Faith, indeed, is all the reform that is needed it is itself a reform.
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We are all of us more or less active physiognomists.
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Like speaks to like only labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.
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Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge college is as solitary as a dervis in the desert.
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A man sits as many risks as he runs.
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It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.
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Men are as innocent as the morning to the unsuspicious.
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How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
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I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They can only force me who obey a higher law than I.... I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live?
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My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.
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Some would find fault with the morning, if they ever got up early enough.. The fault find faults even in Paradise.
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One revelation has been made to the Indian, another to the white man.
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Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.
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There are two classes of men called poets. The one cultivates life, the other art,... one satisfies hunger, the other gratifies the palate.
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Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure.
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If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth
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Go confidently ... Live the life that you imagined.
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