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The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.

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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Autobiographer
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Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
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Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority it is not even a minority then but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.
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Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
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Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.
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I have a great deal of company in my house especially in the morning, when nobody calls.
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As our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers.
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Surely the writer is to address a world of laborers, and such therefore must be his own discipline.
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The man who does not betake himself at once and desperately to sawing is called a loafer, though he may be knocking at the doors of heaven all the while.
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I have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources.
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The cost of a thing is something called life which is given in exchange for it.
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In the production of the necessaries of life Nature is ready enough to assist man.
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Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
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A journal, is a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstasy, what you are grateful for.
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Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.
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Do not despair of life. You have no doubt force enough to overcome your obstacles. Think of the fox prowling through wood and field in a winter night for something to satisfy his hunger. Notwithstanding cold and the hounds and traps, his race survives. I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.
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The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?
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If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
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The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do.
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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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If you indulge in long periods, you must be sure to have a snapper at the end.
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When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.
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