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Every sunset I witness inspires me with the desire to go to West as distant and as fair as that which the sun goes down. Eastward I go only by force but westward I go free.
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
Sun
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Sunset
Force
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Desire
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Every
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Inspire
Eastward
West
Westward
More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.
Henry David Thoreau
If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, But what shall I do? my answer is, If you really wish to do anything, resign your office. When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.
Henry David Thoreau
Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art.
Henry David Thoreau
Man makes very much such a nest for his domestic animals, of withered grass and fodder, as the squirrels and many other wild creatures do for themselves.
Henry David Thoreau
The meeting of two eternities, the past and future....is precisely the present moment.
Henry David Thoreau
But, commonly, men are as much afraid of love as of hate.
Henry David Thoreau
There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, and which no cold can chill.
Henry David Thoreau
We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we.
Henry David Thoreau
I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!
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
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
Henry David Thoreau
Be not merely good. Be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau
After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.
Henry David Thoreau
That is a pathetic inquiry among travelers and geographers after the site of ancient Troy. It is not near where they think it is.When a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be the place it occupied!
Henry David Thoreau
A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.
Henry David Thoreau
There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,--all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!
Henry David Thoreau
This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments?
Henry David Thoreau
You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally, the stuttering, blunderingclod-hopper that I am. Even poetry, you know, is in one sense an infinite brag and exaggeration. Not that I do not stand on all that I have written,--but what am I to the truth I feebly utter?
Henry David Thoreau
Nature is fair in proportion as the youth is pure. The heavens and the earth are one flower the earth is the calyx, the heavens the corolla.
Henry David Thoreau
This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work.
Henry David Thoreau
