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Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any rocks at least as well covered with lichens,and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome or Greece, Etruria or Carthage, or Egypt or Babylon, on these are our cliffs bare?

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
Least
Rome
Mould
Read
Covered
Antiquity
Nature
Soil
Cliffs
Lichens
Cannot
Useful
Virgin
Antiquities
America
Dust
Virgins
Carthage
Wells
Stones
Bare
Furnishes
Well
Ancient
Greece
Babylon
Country
Rocks
Egypt
Durable

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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How little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. They insult nature. Every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws.
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Why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse?
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It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters.
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WE begin to die not in our sense or extremities, but in our divine faculties.
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I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.
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The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.
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Many, no doubt, are well disposed, but sluggish by constitution and habit, and they cannot conceive of a man who is actuated by higher motives than they are. Accordingly they pronounce this man insane, for they know that they could never act as he does, as long as they are themselves.
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The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.
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I am engaged to Concord and my own private pursuits by 10,000 ties, and it would be suicide to rend them.
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I did not know that we had ever quarreled.
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If Nature is our mother, then God is our father.
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What an admirable training is science for the more active warfare of life! Indeed, the unchallenged bravery which these studies imply, is far more impressive than the trumpeted valor of the warrior.
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A traveler who looks at things with an impartial eye may see what the oldest inhabitant has not observed.
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The highest condition of art is artlessness.
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Birds never sing in caves.
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Treat your friends for what you know them to be. Regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did, but what they intended.
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Whatever has not come under the sway of man is wild. In this sense original and independent men are wild - not tamed and broken by society.
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I have a great deal of company in my house especially in the morning, when nobody calls.
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Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savagestands on the unelastic plank of famine.
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We could not help contrasting the equanimity of Nature with the bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume alwaysa crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending.
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