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9f62f18
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Your church is a baby-house made of blocks.
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humor
freethought
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Henry David Thoreau |
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8672d84
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So long as a man is faithful to himself, everything is in his favor, government, society, the very sun, moon, and stars.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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f17ba88
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They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar
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poverty
class
society
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Henry David Thoreau |
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3692ba2
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It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and s..
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Henry David Thoreau |
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17a9de1
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They who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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a9cd085
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The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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d1d1d9b
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None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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f9c300c
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A common and natural result of an undue respect of law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.
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war
soldiers
respect
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Henry David Thoreau |
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d58af3d
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What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?
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Henry David Thoreau |
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b55185c
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This afternoon, being on Fair Haven Hill, I heard the sound of a saw, and soon after from the Cliff saw two men sawing down a noble pine beneath, about forty rods off. I resolved to watch it till it fell, the last of a dozen or more which were left when the forest was cut and for fifteen years have waved in solitary majesty over the sprout-land. I saw them like beavers or insects gnawing at the trunk of this noble tree, the diminutive manik..
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thoreau
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Henry David Thoreau |
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a3e0dca
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I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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89af0cb
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In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home.
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words
literature
reading
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Henry David Thoreau |
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63efe15
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We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
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brave-new-world
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Henry David Thoreau |
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e886baa
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ONLY THE DAY DAWNS TO WHICH WE ARE AWAKE,IF WE ARE TO GRASP THE REALITY OF OUR LIFE WHILE WE HAVE IT,WE WILL NEED TO WAKE UP TO OUR MOMENTS,OTHERWISE,WHOLE DAYS,EVEN A WHOLE LIFE COULD SLIP BY UNNOTICED..
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Henry David Thoreau |
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db96f1e
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Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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52776b8
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I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, to life itself, than this incessant business.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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49bf4c7
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There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.
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poverty
activism
evil
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Henry David Thoreau |
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dd1f506
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Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair as that into which the Sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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ccb0a65
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The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours ...but it is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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f054f72
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I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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9ccfb38
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However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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80bd1f2
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I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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2897ce0
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One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, ..
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war
wood-pile
field
red
black
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Henry David Thoreau |
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236b191
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If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.
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money
work
simple-life
simple-living
productivity
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Henry David Thoreau |
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d580b2d
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Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?
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Henry David Thoreau |
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3684f5b
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I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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ba72218
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Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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88bccbc
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The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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516a969
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What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can old man, -- you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind,- I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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b3291af
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It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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88eb834
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Yet, for my part, I was never usually squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater's heaven. I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a m..
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music
prophetic
vices
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Henry David Thoreau |
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22735ab
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Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel the cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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100895f
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There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.
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materialism
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Henry David Thoreau |
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38025b8
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How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.
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words
literature
reading
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Henry David Thoreau |
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8f4a828
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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.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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95f30b6
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The fate of the country... does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.
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vote
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Henry David Thoreau |
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538ec3c
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The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is mo..
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money
work
occupations
labor
working
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Henry David Thoreau |
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829639a
|
Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let our affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand...Simplify, simplify!
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Henry David Thoreau |
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681ade6
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I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a m..
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Henry David Thoreau |
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5306390
|
Thoreau the "Patron Saint of Swamps" because he enjoyed being in them and writing about them said, "my temple is the swamp... When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most impenetrable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum... I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place...far away from human society. What's the need of visiting far-off mountains..
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marsh
swamp
wetlands
green
ecology
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Henry David Thoreau |
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00e7b31
|
A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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ac6058c
|
Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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642373f
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I am too high born to be propertied, To be a second at control, Or useful serving-man and instrument To any sovereign state throughout the world.
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Henry David Thoreau |
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61ea032
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The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.
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Henry David Thoreau |