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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
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Vex
Advise
Bowels
Autobiography
Objection
Abroad
Biography
Endeavor
Explain
Objections
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Germans
Else
Liable
May
Biographies

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day?
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It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
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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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All nations love the same jests and tales, Jews, Christians, and Mahometans, and the same translated suffice for all.
Henry David Thoreau
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Let nothing come between you and the light.
Henry David Thoreau
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A sufficiently great and generous trust could never be abused.
Henry David Thoreau
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The most stupendous scenery ceases to be sublime when it becomes distinct, or in other words limited, and the imagination is no longer encouraged to exaggerate it. The actual height and breadth of a mountain or a waterfall are always ridiculously small they are the imagined only that content us.
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Heaven is not one of your fertile Ohio bottoms, you may depend on it.
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Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
Henry David Thoreau
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All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is one of the signs of the times. We confess that we have risen from reading this book with enlarged ideas, and grander conceptions of our duties in this world. It did expand us a little.
Henry David Thoreau
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In the winter, warmth stands for all virtue.
Henry David Thoreau
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Translate a book a dozen times from one language to another, and what becomes of its style? Most books would be worn out and disappear in this ordeal. The pen which wrote it is soon destroyed, but the poem survives.
Henry David Thoreau
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Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature.
Henry David Thoreau
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The silence sings. It is musical. I remember a night when it was audible. I heard the unspeakable.
Henry David Thoreau
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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.
Henry David Thoreau
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I am engaged to Concord and my own private pursuits by 10,000 ties, and it would be suicide to rend them.
Henry David Thoreau
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I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure.
Henry David Thoreau
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There is not one kind of food for all men. You must and you will feed those faculties which you exercise. The laborer whose body is weary does not require the same food with the scholar whose brain is weary.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance ... To perceive freshly, with fresh senses is to be inspired.
Henry David Thoreau