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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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau
I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.
Henry David Thoreau
Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance they make the latitudes and longitudes.
Henry David Thoreau
What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.
Henry David Thoreau
The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.
Henry David Thoreau
Today...the bluebirds, old and young, have revisited their box, as if they would fain repeat the summer without intervention of winter, if Nature would let them.
Henry David Thoreau
There is nothing more difficult to find than oneself.
Henry David Thoreau
Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.
Henry David Thoreau
The eye is the jewel of the body.
Henry David Thoreau
The past is only so heroic as we see it. It is the canvas on which our idea of heroism is painted, and so, in one sense, the dim prospectus of our future field.
Henry David Thoreau
Say, Not so, and you will out circle the philosophers.
Henry David Thoreau
We are all of us more or less active physiognomists.
Henry David Thoreau
A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.
Henry David Thoreau
There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,--all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!
Henry David Thoreau
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.
Henry David Thoreau
To be awake is to be alive.
Henry David Thoreau
If Columbus was the first to discover the islands, Americus Vespucius and Cabot, and the Puritans, and we their descendants, havediscovered only the shores of America.
Henry David Thoreau
Heaven is not one of your fertile Ohio bottoms, you may depend on it.
Henry David Thoreau
As if there were safety in stupidity alone
Henry David Thoreau
The perception of beauty is a moral test.
Henry David Thoreau
