Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Inspirational
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To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
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Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.
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The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
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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.
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I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
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Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.
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Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
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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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If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined...
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Between whom there is hearty truth there is love.
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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. . . . In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.
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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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All misfortune is but a stepping stone to fortune.
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Being is the great explainer.
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The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
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The word which is best said came nearest to not being spoken at all, for it is cousin to a deed which the speaker could have better done. Nay, almost it must have taken the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by some misfortune, so that the truest writer will be some captive knight, after all. And perhaps the fates had such a design, when, having stored Raleigh so richly with the substance of life and experience, they made him a fast prisoner, and compelled him to make his words his deeds, and transfer to his expression the emphasis and sincerity of his action.
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For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.
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Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end. Do not resist. With the least inclination to be well, we should not be sick.
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Our thoughts are epochs in our lives; all else is but as a journal of the winds that blow while we are here.
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None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
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I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
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I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision.
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The secret of achievement is to hold a picture of a successful outcome in mind.
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We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.
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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.
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What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
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But there are spirits of a yet more liberal culture, to whom no simplicity is barren. There are not only stately pines, but fragile flowers, like the orchises, commonly described as too delicate for cultivation, which derive their nutriment from the crudest mass of peat. These remind us, that, not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger's path and the Indian's trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness.
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Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.
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Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up.
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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.
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