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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
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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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Praise
Stump
Cutting
Oxen
Bigs
Stumps
Tell
Pine
Become
Yoke
Would
Commonly
Chopper
Stood
Choppers
Grown
Footstool
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
Love does not analyze its object.
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For an impenetrable shield, stand inside yourself
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We never conceive the greatness of our fates.
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We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
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We must have infinite faith in each other.
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It is impossible to give a soldier a good education without making him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him.
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Every sentence is the result of a long probation.
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The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.
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There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon.
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If however the law is so promulgated that it of necessity makes you an agent of injustices against another, then I say to you ... break the law.
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The stars are distant and unobtrusive, but bright and enduring as our fairest and most memorable experiences.
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No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
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Our taste is too delicate and particular. It says nay to the poet's work, but never yea to his hope.
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However mean your life is, meet it and live it do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.
Henry David Thoreau
A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.
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I did not know that mankind was suffering for want of gold.
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Men talk glibly enough about moonshine, as if they knew its qualities very well, and despised them as owls might talk of sunshine,--none of your sunshine!--but this word commonly means merely something which they do not understand,--which they are abed and asleep to, however much it may be worth their while to be up and awake to it.
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The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.
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The golden mean in ethics, as in physics, is the centre of the system and that about which all revolve, and though to a distant and plodding planet it be an uttermost extreme, yet one day, when that planet's year is completed, it will be found to be central.
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Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.
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