"In the wilderness is the salvation of the world."
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 101 of 139)
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"Have no mean hours, but be grateful for every hour, and accept what it brings. The reality will make any sincere record respectable."
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"The words of some men are thrown forcibly against you and adhere like burrs."
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"One should be always on the trail of one's own deepest nature. For it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature that connects you to the Divine."
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"Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man."
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"Before the land rose out of the ocean, and became dry land, chaos reigned; and between high and low water mark, where she is partially disrobed and rising, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures can inhabit."
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"A journal, is a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstasy, what you are grateful for."
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"The prosaic man sees things badly, or with the bodily sense; but the poet sees them clad in beauty, with the spiritual sense."
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"I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman simply because she has regular features."
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"If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment. [Like they say, 'Every cloud has a silver lining'...so if you are patient, expect, anticipate, look and work for some good to come from the cloud, you will be rewarded eventually!]"
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"We have built for this world a family mansion, and the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten."
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"I was daily intoxicated, yet no man could call me intemperate."
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"The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell."
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"Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect."
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"What youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside."
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"The poet will write for his peers alone. He will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely."
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"Give me a country where it is the most natural thing in the world for a government that does not understand you to let you alone."
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"Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, - passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man's capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to!"
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"I want nothing new, if I can have but a tithe of the old secured to me. I will spurn all wealth beside. Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from here! When the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and nearer here!"
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"When it was proposed to me to go abroad, rub oft some rust, and better my condition in a worldly sense, I fear lest my life will lose some of its homeliness. If these fields and streams and woods, the phenomena of nature here, and the simple occupations of the inhabitants should cease to interest and inspire me, no culture or wealth would atone for the loss."
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