Best Quotes by Henry David Thoreau (Top 10)
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I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
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Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Henry David Thoreau
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How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau
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The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
Henry David Thoreau
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Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
Henry David Thoreau
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You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
Henry David Thoreau
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Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
Henry David Thoreau
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If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Henry David Thoreau
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Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau
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I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately...
Henry David Thoreau
More Henry David Thoreau Quotes
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If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau
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Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau
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All good things are cheap: all bad are very dear.
Henry David Thoreau
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Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau
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I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
Henry David Thoreau
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The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
Henry David Thoreau
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Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.
Henry David Thoreau
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There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Henry David Thoreau
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We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
Henry David Thoreau
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Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.
Henry David Thoreau
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Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
Henry David Thoreau
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As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
Henry David Thoreau
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Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
Henry David Thoreau
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Things do not change; we change.
Henry David Thoreau
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What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
Henry David Thoreau
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If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
Henry David Thoreau
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Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
Henry David Thoreau
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It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
Henry David Thoreau
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be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else's idea of yourself should be.
Henry David Thoreau
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The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Henry David Thoreau
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The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
Henry David Thoreau
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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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A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
Henry David Thoreau
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Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
Henry David Thoreau
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Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?
Henry David Thoreau
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This world is but a canvas to our imagination.
Henry David Thoreau
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Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
Henry David Thoreau
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The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
Henry David Thoreau
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As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
Henry David Thoreau
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An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.
Henry David Thoreau
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I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
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What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
Henry David Thoreau
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When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.
Henry David Thoreau
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Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
Henry David Thoreau
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I am a happy camper so I guess I'm doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is never too late to give up our prejudices.
Henry David Thoreau
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I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Henry David Thoreau
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The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
Henry David Thoreau
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How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau
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The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
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I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.
Henry David Thoreau
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Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.
Henry David Thoreau
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Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
Henry David Thoreau
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There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
Henry David Thoreau
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Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
Henry David Thoreau
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I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Henry David Thoreau
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The universe is wider than our views of it.
Henry David Thoreau
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I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
Henry David Thoreau
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We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
Henry David Thoreau
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Men have become the tools of their tools.
Henry David Thoreau
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Men are born to succeed, not to fail.
Henry David Thoreau
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Public opinion is a weak tyrant, compared with our private opinion—what a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates his fate.
Henry David Thoreau
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In wildness is the preservation of the world.
Henry David Thoreau
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What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?
Henry David Thoreau
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To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.
Henry David Thoreau
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I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
Henry David Thoreau
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Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
Henry David Thoreau
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A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
Henry David Thoreau
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Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.
Henry David Thoreau
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What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
Henry David Thoreau
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That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.
Henry David Thoreau
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You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.
Henry David Thoreau
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If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
Henry David Thoreau
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Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
Henry David Thoreau
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The heart is forever inexperienced.
Henry David Thoreau
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In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.
Henry David Thoreau
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Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.
Henry David Thoreau
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Beware of all enterprises that require a new set of clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
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All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.
Henry David Thoreau
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In the long run you only hit what you aim at. Therefore, though you should fail immediately, you had better aim at something high.
Henry David Thoreau
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It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
Henry David Thoreau
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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?
Henry David Thoreau
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Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
Henry David Thoreau
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Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.
Henry David Thoreau
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Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed... Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.
Henry David Thoreau
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He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.
Henry David Thoreau
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I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
Henry David Thoreau
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Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.
Henry David Thoreau
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A gun will give you the body, not the bird
Henry David Thoreau
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It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
Henry David Thoreau
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In the long run, we only hit what we aim at.
Henry David Thoreau
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Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
Henry David Thoreau
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The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
Henry David Thoreau
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We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.
Henry David Thoreau
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Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
Henry David Thoreau
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Man is the artificer of his own happiness.
Henry David Thoreau
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The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?
Henry David Thoreau
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Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
Henry David Thoreau
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Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.
Henry David Thoreau
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The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
Henry David Thoreau
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Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.
Henry David Thoreau
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Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.
Henry David Thoreau
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There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.
Henry David Thoreau
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Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.
Henry David Thoreau
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To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.
Henry David Thoreau
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None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.
Henry David Thoreau
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I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
Henry David Thoreau
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The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.
Henry David Thoreau
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I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
Henry David Thoreau
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There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers
Henry David Thoreau
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Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.
Henry David Thoreau
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He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.
Henry David Thoreau
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Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.
Henry David Thoreau
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I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
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Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
Henry David Thoreau
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A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.
Henry David Thoreau
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Be not simply good - be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau
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If the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success.
Henry David Thoreau
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A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
Henry David Thoreau
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In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.
Henry David Thoreau
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Every man is the builder of a temple called his body.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
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Water is the only drink for a wise man.
Henry David Thoreau
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To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
Henry David Thoreau
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If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.
Henry David Thoreau
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I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
Henry David Thoreau
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Knowledge does not come to us in details, but in flashes of light from heaven.
Henry David Thoreau
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What a man thinks of himself that is what determines, or rather indicates his fate.
Henry David Thoreau
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I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.
Henry David Thoreau
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Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.
Henry David Thoreau
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Even the best things are not equal to their fame.
Henry David Thoreau
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If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are not a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read.
Henry David Thoreau
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Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.
Henry David Thoreau
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Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.
Henry David Thoreau
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The faultfinder will find faults even in paradise.
Henry David Thoreau
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There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.
Henry David Thoreau
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This life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction.
Henry David Thoreau
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Men are probably nearer the essential truth in their superstitions than in their science.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.
Henry David Thoreau
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We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.
Henry David Thoreau
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However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are the richest.
Henry David Thoreau
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Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.
Henry David Thoreau
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I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Henry David Thoreau
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Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.
Henry David Thoreau
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None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Henry David Thoreau
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What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
Henry David Thoreau
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That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.
Henry David Thoreau
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When it's time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived.
Henry David Thoreau
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A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
Henry David Thoreau
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The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
Henry David Thoreau
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The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.
Henry David Thoreau
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Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping.
Henry David Thoreau
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Music is perpetual, and only the hearing is intermittent.
Henry David Thoreau
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The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.
Henry David Thoreau
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Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
Henry David Thoreau
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Truths and roses have thorns about them.
Henry David Thoreau
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The eye is the jewel of the body.
Henry David Thoreau
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If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.
Henry David Thoreau
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Whatever we leave to God, God does and blesses us.
Henry David Thoreau
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When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.
Henry David Thoreau
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Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.
Henry David Thoreau
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The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.
Henry David Thoreau
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All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.
Henry David Thoreau
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Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
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When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a Sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.
Henry David Thoreau
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Behave so the aroma of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere.
Henry David Thoreau
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A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.
Henry David Thoreau
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I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
Henry David Thoreau
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The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.
Henry David Thoreau
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The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.
Henry David Thoreau
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To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.
Henry David Thoreau
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Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind.
Henry David Thoreau
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True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.
Henry David Thoreau
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A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.
Henry David Thoreau
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Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
Henry David Thoreau
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One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then
Henry David Thoreau
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City life is millions of people being lonesome together.
Henry David Thoreau
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We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke strops our vice.
Henry David Thoreau
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We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not.
Henry David Thoreau
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I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.
Henry David Thoreau
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If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.
Henry David Thoreau
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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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Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
Henry David Thoreau
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How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.
Henry David Thoreau
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Associate reverently, and as much as you can, with your loftiest thoughts.
Henry David Thoreau
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The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
Henry David Thoreau
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Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Henry David Thoreau
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If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
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What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.
Henry David Thoreau
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The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.
Henry David Thoreau
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Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined.
Henry David Thoreau
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Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.
Henry David Thoreau
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Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced.
Henry David Thoreau
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My friend is one... who take me for what I am.
Henry David Thoreau
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I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision.
Henry David Thoreau
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The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it.
Henry David Thoreau
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That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another s. We see so much only as we possess.
Henry David Thoreau