"I am a citizen of the world first, and of this country at a later and more convenient hour."
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 79 of 139)
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"One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon."
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"I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars."
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"We soon get through with nature. She excites an expectation which she cannot satisfy."
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"It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor."
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"I have not the most definite designs on the future."
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"Seen from a lower point of view, the Constitution, with all its faults, is very good; the law and the courts are very respectable;even this State and this American government are, in many respects, very admirable, and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them; but seen from a point of view a little higher, they are what I have described them; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?"
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"Any man knows when he is justified, and all the wits in the world cannot enlighten him on that point. The murderer always knows that he is justly punished; but when a government takes the life of a man without the consent of his conscience, it is an audacious government, and is taking a step towards its own dissolution."
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"The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate the world....There is naked Nature, inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray."
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"The natural historian is not a fisherman who prays for cloudy days and good luck merely; but as fishing has been styled "a contemplative man's recreation," introducing him profitably to woods and water, so the fruit of the naturalist's observations is not in new genera or species, but in new contemplations still, and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation."
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"The higher the mountain on which you stand, the less change in the prospect from year to year, from age to age. Above a certain height there is no change."
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"If common sense had been consulted, how many marriages would never have taken place; if uncommon or divine sense, how few marriages such as we witness would ever have taken place!"
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"What is called common sense is excellent in its department, and as invaluable as the virtue of conformity in the army and navy,--for there must be subordination,--but uncommon sense, that sense which is common only to the wisest, is as much more excellent as it is more rare."
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"In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead."
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"All men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground. Better are the physically dead, for they more lively rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. A man's life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant."
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"There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it."
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"The object of love expands and grows before us to eternity, until it includes all that is lovely, and we become all that can love."
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"A man can suffocate on courtesy."
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"One man lies in his words, and gets a bad reputation; another in his manners, and enjoys a good one."
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"There are some things which a man never speaks of, which are much finer kept silent about. To the highest communications we only lend a silent ear."
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