Quote

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

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
Part
Immediate
Acres
Earth
Serving
Cultivated
Tillage
Every
Forests
Meadows
Acre
Would
Support
Supports
Vegetation
Men
Greater
Distant
Meadow
Society
Preparing
Annuals
Future
Forest
Annual
Use
Decay
Mould

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We are all of us more or less active physiognomists.
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The heart is forever inexperienced.
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The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands.
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We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect. [So why not suspect good rather than bad in events, people and life and thereby find it more?]
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As the least drop of wine tinges the whole goblet, so the least particle of truth colors our whole life.
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Many college text-books, which were a weariness and stumbling-block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit.
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The Oriental philosophy approaches easily loftier themes than the modern aspires to and no wonder if it sometimes prattle about them. It only assigns their due rank respectively to Action and Contemplation, or rather does full justice to the latter. Western philosophers have not conceived of the significance of Contemplation in their sense.
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It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have...but shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?
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An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they were rarely disappointed.
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We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.
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Where there is not discernment, the behavior even of the purest soul may in effect amount to coarseness.
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I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.
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Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe.
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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.
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When we are in health, all sounds fife and drum for us we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn.
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The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.
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All that is told of the sea has a fabulous sound to an inhabitant of the land and all its products have a certain fabulous quality, as if they belonged to another planet.
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Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.
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It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.
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However mean your life is, meet it and live it.
Henry David Thoreau