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Under the one word house are included the schoolhouse, the almshouse, the jail, the tavern, the dwellinghouse and the meanest shed or cave in which men live contains elements of all these. But nowhere on the earth stands the entire and perfect house.

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
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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I love the broad margin to my life.
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How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bedridden all world-ridden.
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Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
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Whatever beauty we behold, the more it is distant, serene, and cold, the purer and more durable it is. It is better to warm ourselves with ice than with fire.
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The front aspect of great thoughts can only be enjoyed by those who stand on the side whence they arrive.
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In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.
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The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.
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But, commonly, men are as much afraid of love as of hate.
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What is the singing of birds, or any natural sound, compared with the voice of one we love.
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All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.
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All the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of thewords by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already supernatural philosophy.
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Somehow strangely the vice of men gets well represented and protected but their virtue has none to plead its cause - nor any charter of immunities and rights.
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My desire for knowledge is intermittent but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.
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There is not one kind of food for all men. You must and you will feed those faculties which you exercise. The laborer whose body is weary does not require the same food with the scholar whose brain is weary.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
Henry David Thoreau
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A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.
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The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality the best of the Hindoo Scripture, for its pure intellectuality. The readeris nowhere raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagvat-Geeta.... It is unquestionably one of the noblest and most sacred scriptures which have come down to us.
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Your religion is where your love is.
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I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.
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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