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Henry David Thoreau -
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
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We could not help being struck by the seeming, though innocent, indifference of Nature to these men's necessities, while elsewhereshe was equally serving others. Like a true benefactress, the secret of her service is unchangeableness. Thus is the busiest merchant, though within sight of his Lowell, put to pilgrim's shifts, and soon comes to staff and scrip and scallop-shell.
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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Though the hen should sit all day, she could lay only one egg, and, besides, would not have picked up materials for another.
Henry David Thoreau
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The murmurs of many a famous river on the other side of the globe reach even to us here, as to more distant dwellers on its banks;many a poet's stream, floating the helms and shields of heroes on its bosom.
Henry David Thoreau
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What is commonly honored with the name of Friendship is no very profound or powerful instinct. Men do not, after all, love their Friends greatly. I do not often see the farmers made seers and wise to the verge of insanity by their Friendship for one another. They are not often transfigured and translated by love in each other's presence. I do not observe them purified, refined, and elevated by the love of a man.
Henry David Thoreau
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Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veilhangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating.
Henry David Thoreau
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Our vices always lie in the direction of our virtues, and in their best estate are but plausible imitations of the latter.
Henry David Thoreau
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The constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth.
Henry David Thoreau
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In the wildest nature, there is not only the material of the most cultivated life, and a sort of anticipation of the last result,but a greater refinement already than is ever attained by man.... Nature is prepared to welcome into her scenery the finest work of human art, for she is herself an art so cunning that the artist never appears in his work.
Henry David Thoreau
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Men nowhere, east or west, live yet a natural life, round which the vine clings, and which the elm willingly shadows. Man would desecrate it by his touch, and so the beauty of the world remains veiled to him. He needs not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized, on the soil of earth.
Henry David Thoreau
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The world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand within it.
Henry David Thoreau
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The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.
Henry David Thoreau
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We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies.
Henry David Thoreau
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What other words, we may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to be repeated than those which love has inspired? It is wonderful that they were ever uttered. They are few and rare indeed, but, like a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and modulated by the memory. All other words crumble off with the stucco which overlies the heart. We should not dare to repeat these now aloud. We are not competent to hear them at all times.
Henry David Thoreau
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There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.
Henry David Thoreau
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There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains itsmaxims. It has no temple, nor even a solitary column. There goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore. The hunter has found only fragments of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants.
Henry David Thoreau
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In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.
Henry David Thoreau
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You cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that which shocks you.
Henry David Thoreau
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He who receives an injury is to some extent an accomplice of the wrong-doer.
Henry David Thoreau
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Your scheme must be the framework of the universe; all other schemes will soon be ruins.
Henry David Thoreau
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I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is madeand at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me.
Henry David Thoreau
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The gods are partial to no era, but steadily shines their light in the heavens, while the eye of the beholder is turned to stone.There was but the sun and the eye from the first. The ages have not added a new ray to the one, nor altered a fibre of the other.
Henry David Thoreau
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Some simple dishes recommend themselves to our imaginations as well as palates.
Henry David Thoreau
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There is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but the farthest east.
Henry David Thoreau
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The most stupendous scenery ceases to be sublime when it becomes distinct, or in other words limited, and the imagination is no longer encouraged to exaggerate it. The actual height and breadth of a mountain or a waterfall are always ridiculously small; they are the imagined only that content us.
Henry David Thoreau
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Quote of the day
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Henry David Thoreau
Creative Commons
Born:
July 12, 1817
Died:
May 6, 1862
(aged 44)
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