"Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written."
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 44 of 139)
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"The tree of Knowledge is a Tree of Knowledge of good and evil."
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"Friendship is evanescent in every man's experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers."
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"I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which these things would be by me unavoidable."
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"The most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants."
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"Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?"
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"Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent."
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"One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle."
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"It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in the woods."
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"I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls."
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"Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only."
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"Perchance, coming generations will not abide the dissolution of the globe, but, availing themselves of future inventions in aerial locomotion, and the navigation of space, the entire race may migrate from the earth, to settle some vacant and more western planet.... It took but little art, a simple application of natural laws, a canoe, a paddle, and a sail of matting, to people the isles of the Pacific, and a little more will people the shining isles of space. Do we not see in the firmament the lights carried along the shore by night, as Columbus did? Let us not despair or mutiny."
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"Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails."
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"The dry grasses are not dead for me. A beautiful form has as much life at one season as another."
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"If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard, this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects."
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"It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always. The conscience really does not, and ought not to monopolizethe whole of our lives, any more than the heart or the head. It is as liable to disease as any other part."
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"A man receives only what he is ready to receive... The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest of what he has observed, he does not observe."
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"How novel and original must be each new mans view of the universe - for though the world is so old - and so many books have been written - each object appears wholly undescribed to our experience - each field of thought wholly unexplored - the whole world is an America - a New World."
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"Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind."
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"Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable."
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