Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Truth
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If we dealt only with the false and dishonest, we should at last forget how to speak truth.
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If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends!
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In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.
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If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
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There is none who does not lie hourly in the respect he pays to false appearance.
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As for the tenets of the Brahmans, we are not so much concerned to know what doctrines they held, as that they were held by any. We can tolerate all philosophies.... It is the attitude of these men, more than any communication which they make, that attracts us.
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The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality.
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Men are probably nearer the essential truth in their superstitions than in their science.
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If there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveler always has a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there.
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The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.
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To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense,it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it.
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Here or nowhere is our heaven.
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Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower into a truth.
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Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love; and in proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal. . . . Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.
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There are sure to be two prescriptions diametrically opposite.
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All expression of truth does at length take this deep ethical form.
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You have but little more to do than throw up your cap for entertainment these American days.... Farmers' sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from his throat, though he tells them it is all deception. Surely, men love darkness rather than light.
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When we come down into the distant village, visible from the mountain-top, the nobler inhabitants with whom we peopled it have departed, and left only vermin in its desolate streets. It is the imagination of poets which puts those brave speeches into the mouths of their heroes.
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I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limit of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced.
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It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
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What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and sublimest truth?
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Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.
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Exaggeration! was ever any virtue attributed to a man without exaggeration? was ever any vice, without infinite exaggeration? Do we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves, or do we recognize ourselves for the actual men we are? Are we not all great men? Yet what are we actually, to speak of? We live by exaggeration.
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Let us not play at kittly-benders. There is a solid bottom everywhere.
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The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality.
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Whoever can discern truth has received his commission from a higher source than the chiefest justice in the world who can discernonly law. He finds himself constituted judge of the judge. Strange that it should be necessary to state such simple truths!
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No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day. We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire. Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free trade and of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation.
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Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard.
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How sweet it would be to treat men and things, for an hour, for just what they are!
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A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.
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