"You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns."
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 14 of 139)
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"Whenever I have read any part of the Vedas, I have felt that some unearthly and unknown light illuminated me. In the great teaching of the Vedas, there is no touch of sectarianism. It is of all ages, climbs, and nationalities and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge. When I read it, I feel that I am under the spangled heavens of a summer night."
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". . . we should be men first, and subjects afterward."
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"Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years."
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"Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye."
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"What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives."
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"The only way to tell the truth is to speak with kindness. Only the words of a loving man can be heard."
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"It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination"
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"The voice of nature is always encouraging."
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"The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men."
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"The universe is wider than our views of it."
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"The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals."
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"Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man."
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"Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and Spring."
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"A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it."
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"We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."
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"Only nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not."
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"We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character."
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"What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?"
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"There are more consequences to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice."
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