Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Experience
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Knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.
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I think that no experience which I have today comes up to, or is comparable with, the experiences of my boyhood.
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The value of any experience is measured, of course, not by the amount of money, but the amount of development we get out of it.
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The necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things to the scholar is rarely well remembered.
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In the summer we lay up a stock of experiences for the winter, as the squirrel of nuts?something for conversation in winter evenings.
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Friendship is evanescent in every man's experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers.
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The experience of every past moment but belies the faith of each present.
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We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.
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I should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity; for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.
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Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced.
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That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.
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It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.
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Who is old enough to have learned from experience?
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How novel and original must be each new mans view of the universe - for though the world is so old - and so many books have been written - each object appears wholly undescribed to our experience - each field of thought wholly unexplored - the whole world is an America - a New World.
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A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!
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If within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil's angels.
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Surely one may as profitably be soaked in the juices of a swamp for one day as pick his way dry-shod over sand. Cold and damp ? are they not as rich experience as warmth and dryness?
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When it's time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived.
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Christianity only hopes. It has hung its harp on the willows, and cannot sing a song in a strange land. It has dreamed a sad dream, and does not yet welcome the morning with joy. The mother tells her falsehoods to her child, but, thank heaven, the child does not grow up in its parent's shadow. Our mother's faith has not grown with her experience. Her experience has been too much for her. The lesson of life was too hard for her to learn.
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We are older by faith than by experience.
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The intercourse of the sexes, I have dreamed, is incredibly beautiful, too fair to be remembered. I have had thoughts about it, but they are among the most fleeting and irrecoverable in my experience.
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We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads,--and then we can hardly see anything else.
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The scholar is not apt to make his most familiar experience come gracefully to the aid of his expression.
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Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.
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It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever.
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We can conceive of nothing more fair than something which we have experienced.
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There is, however, this consolation to the most way-worn traveler, upon the dustiest road, that the path his feet describe is so perfectly symbolical of human life,--now climbing the hills, now descending into the vales. From the summits he beholds the heavens and the horizon, from the vales he looks up to the heights again. He is treading his old lessons still, and though he may be very weary and travel-worn, it is yet sincere experience.
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Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours; and yet how long it stands in vain!... Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.
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The stars are distant and unobtrusive, but bright and enduring as our fairest and most memorable experiences.
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The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.
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