"We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us."
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 33 of 139)
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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."
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"Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then."
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"Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion."
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"I stand in awe of my body."
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"He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair."
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"But the place which you have selected for your camp, though never so rough and grim, begins at once to have its attractions, and becomes a very centre of civilization to you: "Home is home, be it never so homely.""
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"Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced."
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"Law never made men a whit more just."
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"It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right."
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"So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity."
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"Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward."
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"The Heavens are as deep as our aspirations are high."
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"We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light."
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"The birds I heard today, which, fortunately, did not come within the scope of my science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation."
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"Concord is just as idiotic as ever in relation to the spirits and their knockings. Most people here believe in a spiritual world ... in spirits which the very bullfrogs in our meadows would blackball. Their evil genius is seeing how low it can degrade them. The hooting of owls, the croaking of frogs, is celestial wisdom in comparison."
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"Knowledge does not come to us in details, but in flashes of light from heaven."
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"The perception of beauty is a moral test."
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"I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don't get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next."
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"Why does it [government] always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?"
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