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I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society.

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
Responsible
Responsibility
Successful
Working
Society
Machinery
Independence

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The vessel, though her masts be firm,Beneath her copper bears a worm.
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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 They appear but as the fashions of past days,--mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small- clothes, out of date.
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I seem to have dodged all my days with one or two persons, and lived upon expectation,--as if the bud would surely blossom and soI am content to live.
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Books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined.
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Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of.
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Especially the transcendental philosophy needs the leaven of humor to render it light and digestible.
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Yet the New Testament treats of man and man's so-called spiritual affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to alone content me, who am not interested solely in man's religious or moral nature, or in man even.
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I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.
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It is dry, hazy June weather. We are more of the earth, farther from heaven these days.
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The husbandman is always a better Greek than the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in commemorating it.
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You never gain something but that you lose something.
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Our science, so called, is always more barren and mixed with error than our sympathies.
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There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.
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Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.
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We must heap up a great pile of doing, for a small diameter of being.
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As we looked up in silence to those distant lights, we were reminded that it was a rare imagination which first taught that the stars are worlds, and had conferred a great benefit on mankind.
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Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
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In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.
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I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?
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To be awake is to be alive.
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