Henry David Thoreau Quotes

If I knew...that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

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I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms....

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For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.

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It is not worth while to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

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There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and for mere gluttony.

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We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice.

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In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.

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Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid.

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One 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.

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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 opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this.

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The Youth gets together the materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on earth, but alas, at length, the middle aged man concludes to build a wood shed with the materials.

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I had three chairs in my house one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

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The millions are awake enough for physical labor but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.... We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

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Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse.

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With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that Light comes into the soul

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Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

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I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

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If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

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Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his tentoes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand insteadof a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

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Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind.

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Make the most of your regrets never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it come to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

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We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.

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You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds.

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For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

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It's never too late to give up our prejudices.

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