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The improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence: as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

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
Probably
Ages
Existence
Improvement
Law
Essential
Age
Essentials
Improvements
Littles
Evolution
Skeletons
Little
Laws
Ancestors
Men
Influence
Ancestor
Progress
Distinguished

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The future is too soon the past. So make perseverance your excellence and go confidently in the direction of your dreams.
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I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.
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Read not the Times, read the Eternities.
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He who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth.
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If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer.
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Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.
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The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.
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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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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.
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It has been so written, for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them.
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Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts who stood their ground.
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It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
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I have never met with a friend who furnished me sea-room. I have only tacked a few times and come to anchor - not sailed - made no voyage, carried no venture.
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I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention. Man is but the place where I stand, and the prospect hence is infinite.
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Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature.
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I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.
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I look upon England today as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated fromlong housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn.
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The world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand within it.
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The only way to speak the truth is to speak lovingly.
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Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.
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