Quote

As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.

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
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Fellow
Rattle
Crazy
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Pots
Shall
Chinese
Monuments
Heard
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High
Fellows
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Made
Admire
Pot
Way
Towns
Hole
Undertook
Think
China
Holes
Kettles

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I stand in awe of my body.
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The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.
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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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Our molting season, like that of the fouls, must be a crisis in our lives.
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The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.
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I don't like the city better, the more I see it, but worse. I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it. It is a thousand times meanerthan I could have imagined.... The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population.
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The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.
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By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.
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Unless the human race perspire more than I do, there is no occasion to live by the sweat of their brow. If men cannot get on without money (the smallest amount will suffice), the truest method of earning it is by working as a laborer at one dollar per day. You are least dependent so I speak as an expert, having used several kinds of labor.
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I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.
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If Columbus was the first to discover the islands, Americus Vespucius and Cabot, and the Puritans, and we their descendants, havediscovered only the shores of America.
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Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.
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Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
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I should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.
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Every man must walk to the beat of his own drummer.
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The young pines springing up in the corn-fields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact.
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We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our friends' thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be.
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Do not engage to find things as you think they are.
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