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A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally, as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only. We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.
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
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Animal
Morally
Whether
Physically
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Animals
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Conceive
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
The most primitive places left with us are the swamps, where the spruce still grows shaggy with usnea.
Henry David Thoreau
A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.
Henry David Thoreau
What can be expressed in words can be expressed in life.
Henry David Thoreau
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.
Henry David Thoreau
It is not so important that many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere for that will leaven the whole lump.
Henry David Thoreau
You never gain something but that you lose something.
Henry David Thoreau
Improve every opportunity to be melancholy.
Henry David Thoreau
In the planting of the seeds of most trees, the best gardeners do no more than follow Nature, though they may not know it.
Henry David Thoreau
Don't be afraid that your life will end, be afraid that it will never begin!
Henry David Thoreau
Music is the crystallization of sound.
Henry David Thoreau
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old return to them. Things do not change we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.
Henry David Thoreau
Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
There are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or inlet, yet unexplored by him.
Henry David Thoreau
Yet the New Testament treats of man and man's so-called spiritual affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to alone content me, who am not interested solely in man's religious or moral nature, or in man even.
Henry David Thoreau
Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.
Henry David Thoreau
The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea.
Henry David Thoreau
For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men?
Henry David Thoreau
The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.
Henry David Thoreau
Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?
Henry David Thoreau
