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Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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"What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook."
Education

"Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth."
Nature

"Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it."
Nature

"It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature."

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

"Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something."

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."
Imagination

"Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something."

"Goodness is the only investment that never fails."

"If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law."

"Law never made men a whit more just."

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
Life

"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."
Life

"Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself."
Nature

"Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain."
Nature

"The bluebird carries the sky on his back."
Nature

"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after."
Sports

"However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts."

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves."

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