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To say that a man is your Friend means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy.
Henry David Thoreau
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We could not help contrasting the equanimity of Nature with the bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume alwaysa crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending.
Henry David Thoreau
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A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!
Henry David Thoreau
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Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. Often the poor man is not cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune.
Henry David Thoreau
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There are some things which a man never speaks of, which are much finer kept silent about. To the highest communications we only lend a silent ear.
Henry David Thoreau
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Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man.
Henry David Thoreau
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A man's interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.
Henry David Thoreau
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There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.
Henry David Thoreau
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One revelation has been made to the Indian, another to the white man.
Henry David Thoreau
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Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towardsrecognizing and organizing the rights of man?
Henry David Thoreau
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Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.
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... the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.
Henry David Thoreau
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I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidatesas the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought.
Henry David Thoreau
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In civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes.
Henry David Thoreau
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I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly.
Henry David Thoreau
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I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock, — that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things.
Henry David Thoreau
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The man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.
Henry David Thoreau
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Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses; but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes. What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? — If you cannot tolerate the planet that it is on? Grade the ground first. If a man believes and expects great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him … he will be surrounded by grandeur. He is in the condition of a healthy and hungry man, who says to himself, — How sweet this crust is!
Henry David Thoreau
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What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see whata work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. Where is our professor of belles-lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well?
Henry David Thoreau
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Absolutely speaking, Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you is by no means a golden rule, but the best of current silver. An honest man would have but little occasion for it. It is golden not to have any rule at all in such a case.
Henry David Thoreau
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Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts - a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.
Henry David Thoreau
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All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity.
Henry David Thoreau
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Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.
Henry David Thoreau
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Continued traveling is far from productive. It begins with wearing away the soles of the shoes, and making the feet sore, and erelong it will wear a man clean up, after making his heart sore into the bargain. I have observed that the afterlife of those who have traveled much is very pathetic.
Henry David Thoreau
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Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather, indicates, his fate.
Henry David Thoreau
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Quote of the day
Every hand and every hour should be devoted to rescue the world from its insanity of guilt, and to assuage the pangs of human hearts with balm and anodyne. To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.
Horace Mann
Henry David Thoreau
Creative Commons
Born:
July 12, 1817
Died:
May 6, 1862
(aged 44)
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