"No people ever lived by cursing their fathers, however great a curse their fathers might have been to them."
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 82 of 139)
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"Men are as innocent as the morning to the unsuspicious."
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"I did not know that mankind was suffering for want of gold."
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"God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator."
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"We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood....What a perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature. What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the poke!"
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"In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while."
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"Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant andfluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and independence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any."
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"I delight to come to my bearings,... not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sitthoughtfully while it goes by."
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"I would stand upon facts."
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"Heaven is not one of your fertile Ohio bottoms, you may depend on it."
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"In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind."
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"The book has never been written which is to be accepted without any allowance."
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"Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of."
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"Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights."
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"Asked whether or not he believed in an afterlife, Thoreau quipped, "One world at a time.""
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"All good things are cheap: all bad are very dear."
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"We must take root; send out some little fibre at least, even every winter day."
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"We live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another."
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"The process of discovery is very simple. An unwearied and systematic application of known laws to nature, causes the unknown to reveal themselves. Almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method."
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"It is the man determines what is said, not the words."
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