Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Literature
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Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
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The heart is forever inexperienced.
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Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell and Wordsworth are but the rustling of leaves and crackling of twigs in the forest, and there is not yet the sound of any bird. The Muse has never lifted up her voice to sing.
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Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
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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.
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What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
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English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wildness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wild man in her, became extinct.
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Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.
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Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.
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The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.
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To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
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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 have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.
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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.
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Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.
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Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.
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It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.
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All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil. The fight to the finish spirit is the one... characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers.
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There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.
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How can any man be weak who dares to be at all?
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Faith never makes a confession.
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Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
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Justice is sweet and musical; but injustice is harsh and discordant.
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Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time.
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Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art.
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I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
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If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.
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I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.
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Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent.
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But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. It is not adistance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials. What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. Homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone,--nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon.
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