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I have no designs on society, or nature, or God. I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that. I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future. I love to live.
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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Ecologist
Environmentalist
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Naturalist
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Love
Present
Simply
Society
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Past
Anticipate
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end. Do not resist. With the least inclination to be well, we should not be sick.
Henry David Thoreau
As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.
Henry David Thoreau
The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast- off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.
Henry David Thoreau
Life is so short that it is not wise to take roundabout ways, nor can we spend much time in waiting.... We have not got half-way to dawn yet.
Henry David Thoreau
We discover a new world every time we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow.
Henry David Thoreau
If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
Henry David Thoreau
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.
Henry David Thoreau
Then at night the general stillness is more impressive than any sound, but occasionally you hear the note of an owl farther or nearer in the woods, and if near a lake, the semihuman cry of the loons at their unearthly revels.
Henry David Thoreau
If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.
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
Love is no individual's experience and though we are imperfect mediums, it does not partake of our imperfection though we are finite, it is infinite and eternal.
Henry David Thoreau
Resign yourself to the influence of the earth.
Henry David Thoreau
One should be always on the trail of one's own deepest nature. For it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature that connects you to the Divine.
Henry David Thoreau
I have seen some whose consciences, owing undoubtedly to former indulgence, had grown to be as irritable as spoilt children, and at length gave them no peace. They did not know when to swallow their cud, and their lives of course yielded no milk.
Henry David Thoreau
The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day.
Henry David Thoreau
The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.
Henry David Thoreau
When the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen.
Henry David Thoreau
When a shadow flits across the landscape of the soul where is the substance?
Henry David Thoreau
I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it.
Henry David Thoreau
I have traveled a good deal in Concord and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.
Henry David Thoreau