Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Life
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Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
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As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
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To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
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Do not suffer your life to be taken by newspapers.
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We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little interesting to me.
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The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.
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Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.
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So soon did we, wayfarers, begin to learn that man's life is rounded with the same few facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel to find it new.
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Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.
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The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
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The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body.
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Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.
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How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
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A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.
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I do believe that the outward and the inward life correspond; that if any should succeed to live a higher life, others would not know of it; that difference and distance are one. To set about living a true life is to go on a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men; and as long as the old are around me, I know that I am not in any true sense living a new or a better life.
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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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As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
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If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.
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Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.
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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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In the production of the necessaries of life Nature is ready enough to assist man.
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We live but a fraction of our lives.
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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.
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As to conforming outwardly and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that.
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How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
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To be awake is to be alive.
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I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.
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But perhaps a man is not required to bury himself.
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Unless we do more than simply learn the trade of our time, we are but apprentices, and not yet masters of the art of life.
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I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it.
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