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I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only.
Henry David Thoreau
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Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moonnor firefly has shown me the causeway to it.
Henry David Thoreau
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Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th,1847.
Henry David Thoreau
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There have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty and ampleness of Nature herself.
Henry David Thoreau
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Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, which in others are luxuries merely and in others still are entirely unknown.
Henry David Thoreau
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Plainly the fox belongs to a different order of things from that which reigns in the village. Our courts, though they offer a bounty for his hide, and our pulpits, though they draw many a moral from his cunning, are in few senses contemporary with his free forest life.
Henry David Thoreau
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The life of a wise man is most of all extemporaneous, for he lives out of an eternity which includes all time.
Henry David Thoreau
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I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They can only force me who obey a higher law than I.... I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live?
Henry David Thoreau
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The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks where the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets.
Henry David Thoreau
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I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it.
Henry David Thoreau
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I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise til noon, rapt in a revery.
Henry David Thoreau
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Here I am thirty-four years old, and yet my life is almost wholly unexpanded. How much time is in the germ! There is such an interval between my ideal and the actual in many circumstances that I may say I am unborn.
Henry David Thoreau
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When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left.
Henry David Thoreau
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So near along life's stream are the fountains of innocence and youth making fertile its sandy margin; and the voyageur will do well to replenish his vessels often at these uncontaminated sources.
Henry David Thoreau
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As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period of my life; I mean that I had some.
Henry David Thoreau
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This life we live is a strange dream, and I don't believe at all any account men give of it.
Henry David Thoreau
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I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.
Henry David Thoreau
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I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is.
Henry David Thoreau
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For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it (life), whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to 'glorify God and enjoy him forever.'
Henry David Thoreau
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It is a momentous fact that a man may be good, or he may be bad; his life may be true, or it may be false; it may be either a shame or a glory to him. The good man builds himself up; the bad man destroys himself.
Henry David Thoreau
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Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life... would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.
Henry David Thoreau
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The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable; of a bad one, to make it less valuable.
Henry David Thoreau
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Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words akind of blood must circulate forever.
Henry David Thoreau
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We say justly that the weak person is flat, for, like all flat substances, he does not stand in the direction of his strength, that is, on his edge, but affords a convenient surface to put upon. He slides all the way through life.... But the brave man is a perfect sphere, which cannot fall on its flat side and is equally strong every way.
Henry David Thoreau
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How many a poor immortal soul I have met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it [an oversized home].
Henry David Thoreau
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Quote of the day
Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.
Georges Bataille
Henry David Thoreau
Creative Commons
Born:
July 12, 1817
Died:
May 6, 1862
(aged 44)
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