"Can we not do without the society of our gossip a little while, - have our own thoughts to cheer us?"
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 100 of 139)
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"This fair homestead has fallen to us, and how little have we done to improve it, how little have we cleared and hedged and ditched! We are too inclined to go hence to a "better land," without lifting a finger, as our farmers are moving to the Ohio soil; but would it not be more heroic and faithful to till and redeem this New England soil of the world?"
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"Why do you ever mend your clothes, unless that, wearing them, you may mend your ways. Let us sing."
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"I love reform better than its modes."
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"There are theoretical reformers at all times, and all the world over, living on anticipation."
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"Any man will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and classbooks, and when we leave school, the Little Reading, and story books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins."
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"I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it for warmth as well as shelter."
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"Under the one word "house" are included the schoolhouse, the almshouse, the jail, the tavern, the dwellinghouse; and the meanest shed or cave in which men live contains elements of all these. But nowhere on the earth stands the entire and perfect house."
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"Truly, our greatest blessings are very cheap."
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"Especially the transcendental philosophy needs the leaven of humor to render it light and digestible."
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"The culture of the hop ... so analagous to the culture and uses of the grape, may afford a theme for future poets."
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"Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid."
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"Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray."
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"The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact."
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"The true and not despairing Friend will address his Friend in some such terms as these. "I never asked thy leave to let me love thee,--I have a right. I love thee not as something private and personal, which is your own, but as something universal and worthy of love, which I have found. O, how I think of you! You are purely good, --you are infinitely good. I can trust you forever. I did not think that humanity was so rich. Give me an opportunity to live."
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"Don't get to the end of your life and realize you have never lived."
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"My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting."
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"This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore."
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"If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets."
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"A gun will give you the body, not the bird"
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