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We seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by man.
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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Seems
Earth
Must
Men
Habitable
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Ordeal
Thinking
Ordeals
Sheep
Seem
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
All health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear all disease and failure helps to make me sad anddoes me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it.
Henry David Thoreau
My desire for knowledge is intermittent but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.
Henry David Thoreau
I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority? Would you have had him wait till that time came?--till you and I came over to him?
Henry David Thoreau
Even trees do not die without a groan.
Henry David Thoreau
How full of the creative genius is the air in which these [snowflakes] are generated! I should hardly admire them more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. Nature is full of genius. Full of the divinity. So that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
Henry David Thoreau
The man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.
Henry David Thoreau
I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
Henry David Thoreau
We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not.
Henry David Thoreau
I have no designs on society, or nature, or God. I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that. I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future. I love to live.
Henry David Thoreau
We never exchange more than three words with a Friend in our lives on that level to which our thoughts and feelings almost habitually rise.
Henry David Thoreau
I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society.
Henry David Thoreau
It is a great art to saunter !
Henry David Thoreau
The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailors' Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather.
Henry David Thoreau
Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors,--why the judge does not dismiss his case,--why the preacher does not dismisshis congregation! It is because they do not obey the hint God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all.
Henry David Thoreau
The authority of government . . . can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.
Henry David Thoreau
What is human warfare but just this an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
Henry David Thoreau
How meanly and grossly do we deal with nature!
Henry David Thoreau
I love a life whose plot is simple.
Henry David Thoreau
I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men. The former are so much the freer.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
