"In my walks, I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something out of the woods?"
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 46 of 139)
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"Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside."
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"We can never have enough of Nature."
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"One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in."
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"Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be."
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"There is no just and serene criticism as yet."
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"Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides States and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine."
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"No human being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does."
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"Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour."
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"I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters."
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"if i repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. what demon possessed me that i behaved so well?"
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"Nature is full of genius, full of divinity."
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"A hero's love is as delicate as a maiden's."
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"We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character."
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"I think we may safely trust a good deal more than we do."
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"With all your science can you tell me how it is, and when it is, that light comes into the soul?"
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"I can alter my life by altering my attitude. He who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers."
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"Be not merely good. Be good for something."
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"All misfortune is but a stepping stone to fortune."
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"The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light and with a lamp lengthen out the day."
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