"It's the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us. The question is not what you look at but what you see."
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Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 1 of 139)
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"Simplify your life. Don't waste the years struggling for things that are unimportant. Don't burden yourself with possessions. Keep your needs and wants simple and enjoy what you have. Don't destroy your peace of mind by looking back, worrying about the past. Live in the present. Simplify!"
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"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined..."
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"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately."
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"be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else's idea of yourself should be."
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"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us."
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"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."
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"The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover it was never fish that you were after."
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"As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives."
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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 of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this."
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"The only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost."
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"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."
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"I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this."
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"There is no remedy for love but to love more."
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"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
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"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
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"I am a happy camper so I guess I’m doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder."
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"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust."
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"An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day."
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"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."
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