Quote

Long as I have lived, and many blasphemers as I have heard and seen, I have never yet heard or witnessed any direct and consciousblasphemy or irreverence but of indirect and habitual, enough. Where is the man who is guilty of direct and personal insolence to Him that made him?

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
Many
Habitual
Made
Guilty
Direct
Long
Lived
Irreverence
Never
Personal
Insolence
Men
Seen
Indirect
Heard
Witnessed
Enough
Blasphemy

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
Henry David Thoreau
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I am grateful for what I have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.
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I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.
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Like speaks to like only labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.
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The necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things to the scholar is rarely well remembered.
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How meanly and grossly do we deal with nature!
Henry David Thoreau
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As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full.
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If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it.
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I always see those of whom I have heard well with a slight disappointment. They are so much better than the great herd, and yet the heavens are not shivered into diamonds over their heads.
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Every people have gods to suit their circumstances.
Henry David Thoreau
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I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect...always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished.
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At present the globe goes with a shattered constitution in its orbit.... No doubt the simple powers of nature, properly directed by man, would make it healthy and a paradise as the laws of man's own constitution but wait to be obeyed, to restore him to health and happiness.
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Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
Henry David Thoreau
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A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep.
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I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.
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No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes: yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.
Henry David Thoreau
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The kindness I have longest remembered has been of this sort, the sort unsaid so far behind the speaker's lips that almost it already lay in my heart. It did not have far to go to be communicated.
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I was awakened at midnight by some heavy, low-flying bird, probably a loon, flapping by close over my head, along the shore. So, turning the other side of my half-clad body to the fire, I sought slumber again.
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Even in civilized communities, the embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development.
Henry David Thoreau
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What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation!
Henry David Thoreau