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Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

"That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest."

"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us."

"Only nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not."

"Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand."

"The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?"

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."

"How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?"

"Live your life, do your work, then take your hat."

"I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now."

"The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument."

"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."

"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."

"Being is the great explainer."

"Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts - a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments."

"For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old."

"If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself."

"It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?"

"Beware of all enterprises that require a new set of clothes."

"We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches."

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