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Henry David Thoreau -
Nature
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You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint "No Admittance" on my gate.
Henry David Thoreau
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We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood....What a perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature. What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the poke!
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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There should always be some flowering and maturing of the fruits of nature in the cooking process.
Henry David Thoreau
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I make my own time. I make my own terms. I cannot see how God or Nature can ever get the start of me.
Henry David Thoreau
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I already, and for weeks afterward, felt my nature the coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was reminded that ourlife should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower.
Henry David Thoreau
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Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but findher our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds.
Henry David Thoreau
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Through the din and desultoriness of noon, even in the most Oriental city, is seen the fresh and primitive and savage nature, in which Scythians and Ethiopians and Indians dwell. What is echo, what are light and shade, day and night, ocean and stars, earthquake and eclipse, there? The works of man are everywhere swallowed up in the immensity of nature. The AEgean Sea is but Lake Huron still to the Indian.
Henry David Thoreau
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The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality.
Henry David Thoreau
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There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, and which no cold can chill.
Henry David Thoreau
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If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point.
Henry David Thoreau
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Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any; rocks at least as well covered with lichens,and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome or Greece, Etruria or Carthage, or Egypt or Babylon, on these; are our cliffs bare?
Henry David Thoreau
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It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself.
Henry David Thoreau
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Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.
Henry David Thoreau
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In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.
Henry David Thoreau
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If I wished to see a mountain or other scenery under the most favorable auspices, I would go to it in foul weather, so as to be there when it cleared up; we are then in the most suitable mood, and nature is most fresh and inspiring. There is no serenity so fair as that which is just established in a tearful eye.
Henry David Thoreau
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Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another. The oak dies down to the ground, leaving within its rind a rich virgin mold, which will impart a vigorous life to an infant forest.
Henry David Thoreau
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In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round,--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature.
Henry David Thoreau
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If I am overflowing with life, am rich in experience for which I lack expression, then nature will be my language full of poetry - all nature will fable, and every natural phenomenon be a myth.
Henry David Thoreau
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For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle. What a coarse and imperfect use Indiansand hunters make of nature! No wonder that their race is so soon exterminated.
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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With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike.
Henry David Thoreau
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I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.
Henry David Thoreau
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If some are prosecuted for abusing children, others deserve to be prosecuted for maltreating the face of nature committed to their care.
Henry David Thoreau
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Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children. Consider the silent influencewhich flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified there.
Henry David Thoreau
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Quote of the day
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
Robert F. Kennedy
Henry David Thoreau
Creative Commons
Born:
July 12, 1817
Died:
May 6, 1862
(aged 44)
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