Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

American writer

Lived from: 1817 - 1862

Category: Writers (Contemporary) Country: FlagUnited States

Born: 12 july 1817 Died: 6 may 1862

Quotes 21 till 40 of 282.

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  • Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • Be not simply good; be good for something.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • Even the best things are not equal to their fame.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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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.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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  • If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.
    ― Henry David Thoreau
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