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The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past days,--mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small- clothes, out of date.
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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Autobiographer
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Ecologist
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
The only way to speak the truth is to speak lovingly.
Henry David Thoreau
A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.
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If we cannot sing of faith and triumph, we will sing our despair. We will be that kind of bird. There are day owls, and there arenight owls, and each is beautiful and even musical while about its business.
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Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.
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When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow.
Henry David Thoreau
To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.
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A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck.
Henry David Thoreau
To speak or do anything that shall concern mankind, one must speak and act as if well, or from that grain of health which he has left.
Henry David Thoreau
One cannot too soon forget his errors and misdemeanors for to dwell long upon them is to add to the offense, and repentance and sorrow can only be displaced by somewhat better, and which is as free and original as if they had not been.
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A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book.
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Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.
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Improve every opportunity to be melancholy.
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Justice is sweet and musical but injustice is harsh and discordant.
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All great enterprises are self-supporting.
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Endeavor to live the life you have imagined.
Henry David Thoreau
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
Henry David Thoreau
I make myself rich by making my wants few.
Henry David Thoreau
If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me.
Henry David Thoreau
Since most of us spend our lives doing ordinary tasks, the most important thing is to carry them out extraordinarily well.
Henry David Thoreau
Birds never sing in caves.
Henry David Thoreau
