"The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue."
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 74 of 139)
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"The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine."
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"We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto."
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"The cost of a thing is something called life which is given in exchange for it."
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"Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society."
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"Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be."
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"Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are."
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"I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born."
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"Some interests have got a footing on the earth which we have not made sufficient allowance for."
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"The most primitive places left with us are the swamps, where the spruce still grows shaggy with usnea."
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"Some creatures are made to see in the dark."
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"Poetry is the mysticism of mankind."
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"Treat your friends for what you know them to be. Regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did, but what they intended."
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"To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine...So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it."
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"I think of no news to tell you. It is a serene summer day here, all above the snow. The hens steal their nests, and I steal theireggs still, as formerly. This is what I do with the hands. Ah, labor,--it is a divine institution, and conversation with many men and hens."
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"In the summer we lay up a stock of experiences for the winter, as the squirrel of nuts?something for conversation in winter evenings."
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"To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating."
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"Endeavor to live the life you have imagined."
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"A man's wealth is measured by what he doesn't need."
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"Tradition is a more interrupted and feebler memory."
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