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There is such a thing as caste, even in the West but it is comparatively faint it is conservatism here. It says, forsake not your calling, outrage no institution, use no violence, rend no bonds the State is thy parent. Its virtue or manhood is wholly filial.

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
Violence
Wholly
Caste
Virtue
Institution
Castes
Parent
Conformity
Forsake
State
Calling
Faint
Use
India
Bonds
States
Institutions
Outrage
Rend
Even
West
Conservatism
Filial
Thing
Says
Manhood
Comparatively

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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Man is but the place where I stand.
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Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.
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The poet is no tender slip of fairy stock, who requires peculiar institutions and edicts for his defense, but the toughest son ofearth and of Heaven, and by his greater strength and endurance his fainting companions will recognize the God in him. It is the worshipers of beauty, after all, who have done the real pioneer work of the world.
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Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons.
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In wildness is the preservation of the world.
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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.
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I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.
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Invariably our best nights were those when it rained.
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Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.
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Even the best things are not equal to their fame.
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Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.
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The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past days,--mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small- clothes, out of date.
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A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man,--a denizen of the woods. The pale white man! I do not wonder that the African pitied him.
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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.
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Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.
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One who knew how to appropriate the true value of this world would be the poorest man in it. The poor rich man! all he has is whathe has bought.
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By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.
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Decay and disease are often beautiful, like the pearly tear of the shellfish and the hectic glow of consumption.
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I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.
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I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks.
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