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There are theoretical reformers at all times, and all the world over, living on anticipation.

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
Living
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Reformers
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A man can suffocate on courtesy.
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A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
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Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end. Do not resist. With the least inclination to be well, we should not be sick.
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He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past
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Resign yourself to the influence of the earth.
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If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
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Birds never sing in caves.
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Undoubtedly, in the most brilliant successes, the first rank is always sacrificed.
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As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
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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.
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The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover it was never fish that you were after.
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We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
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Most people dread finding out when they come to die that they have never really lived.
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If to chaffer and higgle are bad in trade, they are much worse in Love. It demands directness as of an arrow.
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The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.
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To speak or do anything that shall concern mankind, one must speak and act as if well, or from that grain of health which he has left.
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But perhaps a man is not required to bury himself.
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To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.
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Men reverence one another, not yet God.
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Where is the unexplored land but in our own untried enterprises? To an adventurous spirit any place--London, New York, Worcester, or his own yard--is unexplored land, to seek which Frémont and Kane travel so far. To a sluggish and defeated spirit even the Great Basin and the Polaris are trivial places.
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