Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Simplicity
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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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However mean your life is, meet it and live it.
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Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.
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Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.
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Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.
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Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.
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Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse.
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Pray, for what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuviæ; at last to go from this world to another newly furnished, and leave this to be burned?
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Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
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Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!
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He may travel who can subsist on the wild fruits and game of the most cultivated country.
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To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.
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The rule is to carry as little as possible.
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The savage lives simply through ignorance and idleness or laziness, but the philosopher lives simply through wisdom.
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I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again.
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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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In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.
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Simplicity is the peak of civilization.
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The very austerity of the Brahmans is tempting to the devotional soul, as a more refined and nobler luxury. Wants so easily and gracefully satisfied seem like a more refined pleasure. Their conception of creation is peaceful as a dream.
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Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
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We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.
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Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
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I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.
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Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.
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Some simple dishes recommend themselves to our imaginations as well as palates.
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My themes will not be far-fetched. I will tell of homely every-day phenomena and adventures.
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The process of discovery is very simple. An unwearied and systematic application of known laws to nature, causes the unknown to reveal themselves. Almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method.
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There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once,--for the root is faith,--I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say.
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Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant andfluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and independence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any.
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A man may travel fast enough and earn his living on the road.
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