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The only fruit which even much living yields seems to be often only some trivial success,—the ability to do some slight thing better. We mak...

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A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.

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Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important it...

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All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.

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It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfu...

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An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the h...

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We know of no scripture which records the pure benignity of the gods on a New England winter night. Their praises have never been sung, only t...

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Men have become the tools of their tools. Technology

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We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

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It is not enough that our life is an easy one. We must live on the stretch, retiring to our rest like soldiers on the eve of a battle, looking...

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Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it but as I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.

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Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; and it was cert...

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The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere makeshifts, and a shirking of the real business of life,—chiefly becaus...

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I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. 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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None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

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We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this village do...

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Once also it was my business to go in search of the relics of a human body, mangled by sharks, which had just been cast up, a week after a wre...

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I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

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I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came into contact with the more civilized. Walden, 1854

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The newspaper is a Bible which we read every morning and every afternoon, standing and sitting, riding and walking. It is a Bible which every ...

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