Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Wisdom
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The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
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Not by constraint or severity shall you have access to true wisdom, but by abandonment, and childlike mirth-fulness. If you would know aught, be gay before it.
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The wise are not so much wiser than others as respecters of their own wisdom.
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You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.
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From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality.
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Webster never goes behind government, and so cannot speak with authority about it. His words are wisdom to those legislators who contemplate no essential reform in the existing government; but for thinkers, and those who legislate for all time, he never once glances at the subject.... Comparatively, he is always strong, original, and, above all, practical. Still, his quality is not wisdom, but prudence.
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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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The life of a wise man is most of all extemporaneous, for he lives out of an eternity which includes all time.
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Ex oriente lux may still be the motto of scholars, for the Western world has not yet derived from the East all the light which itis destined to receive thence.
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The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
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English sense has toiled, but Hindoo wisdom never perspired.
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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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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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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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It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.
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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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Is there any such thing as wisdom not applied to life?
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The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man.
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It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
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A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.
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I should consider it a greater success to interest one wise and earnest soul, than a million unwise and frivolous.
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A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
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A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance.
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Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
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That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.
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I do not remember anything which Confucius has said directly respecting man's "origin, purpose, and destiny." He was more practical than that. He is full of wisdom applied to human relations,--to the private life,--the family,--government, etc. It is remarkable that, according to his own account, the sum and substance of his teaching is, as you know, to do as you would be done by.
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All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
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A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.
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The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful.
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After reading Howitt's account of the Australian gold-diggings one evening,... I asked myself why I might not be washing some golddaily, though it were only the finest particles,--why I might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine.... At any rate, I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence.
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