"Waves of a serene life pass over us from time to time, like flakes of sunlight over the fields in cloudy weather."
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 5 of 139)
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"It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?"
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"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."
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"Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me."
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"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience."
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"As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs."
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"The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond."
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"Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads."
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"We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain."
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"There is one consolation in being sick; and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before."
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"Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new."
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"The Friend asks no return but that his Friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other's hopes. They are kind to each other's dreams."
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"Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought."
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"A friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. The friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other's hopes. They are kind to each other's dreams."
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"A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure."
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"On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world."
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"How earthy old people become --moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets."
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"Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful."
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"I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals."
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"You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds."
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