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Biography, too, is liable to the same objection it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am not I, who will be?

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
Autobiography
Bowels
Abroad
Objection
Endeavor
Biography
Explain
Objections
Somebody
Germans
Else
Liable
May
Biographies
Advise
Vex

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The researcher is more memorable than the researched.
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We should impart our courage and not our despair.
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Most men, it seems to me, do not care for Nature and would sell their share in all her beauty, as long as they may live, for a stated sum - many for a glass of rum. Thank God, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!
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The state does not demand justice of its members, but thinks that it succeeds very well with the least degree of it, hardly more than rogues practice and so do the neighborhood and the family. What is commonly called Friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues.
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I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.
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It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living: how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious for if getting a living is not so, then living is not.
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I bought me a spy-glass some weeks since. I buy but a few things, and those not till long after I begin to want them, so that when I do get them I am prepared to make a perfect use of them and extract their whole sweet.
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If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
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The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.
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There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon.
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If ever I did a man any goodof course it was something exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil which I am constantly doing by being what I am.
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I have seen more men than usual, lately and, well as I was acquainted with one, I am surprised to find what vulgar fellows they are.
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Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.
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It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters.
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I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings.
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Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.
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Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
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The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.
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There is no history of how bad became better.
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In the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn.
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