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I make it my business to extract from Nature what ever nutriment she can furnish me.... I milk the sky and the earth.
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
Translator
Writer
birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Sky
Business
Nature
Earth
Ever
Nutriment
Make
Furnish
Extract
Milk
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
In 1848, Thoreau went to jail for refusing, as a protest against the Mexican war, to pay his poll tax. When RW Emerson came to bail him out, Emerson said, 'Henry, what are you doing in there?' Thoreau quietly replied, 'Ralph, what are you doing out there?'
Henry David Thoreau
The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindu, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich inward.
Henry David Thoreau
There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.
Henry David Thoreau
The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.
Henry David Thoreau
I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.
Henry David Thoreau
We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not.
Henry David Thoreau
We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.
Henry David Thoreau
I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.
Henry David Thoreau
No people ever lived by cursing their fathers, however great a curse their fathers might have been to them.
Henry David Thoreau
Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?
Henry David Thoreau
To regret deeply is to live afresh.
Henry David Thoreau
Continued traveling is far from productive. It begins with wearing away the soles of the shoes, and making the feet sore, and erelong it will wear a man clean up, after making his heart sore into the bargain. I have observed that the afterlife of those who have traveled much is very pathetic.
Henry David Thoreau
As for me, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are now only the subtlest imaginable essences, which would not stain the morning sky.
Henry David Thoreau
The law will never make a man free it is men who have got to make the law free.
Henry David Thoreau
When the first light dawned on the earth, and the birds awoke, and the brave river was heard rippling confidently seaward, and the nimble early rising wind rustled the oak leaves about our tent, all people, having reinforced their bodies and their souls with sleep, and cast aside doubt and fear, were invited to unattempted adventures.
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
Though my life is low, if my spirit looks upward habitually at an elevated angle, it is as if it were redeemed. When the desire to be better than we are is really sincere we are instantly elevated, and so far better already.
Henry David Thoreau
No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes: yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.
Henry David Thoreau
Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve.
Henry David Thoreau
There is absolutely no common sense, it is common non-sense.
Henry David Thoreau
