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Henry David Thoreau's Quotes

* Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.
* I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe? "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
* Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.
* Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
* The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
* A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
* Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.
* 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.
* 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.
My understanding is that the 'not' is an archaic structure from Old English usage, the full phrase being "not but to" . . . which makes the sentence into: "and see if I could not but to learn what it had to teach". Its just am old fashioned, more formalized for emphasis, way of saying "to see if I could learn what it had to teach".
* The surliness with which the woodchopper speaks of his woods, handling them as indifferently as his axe, is better than the mealy-mouthed enthusiasm of the lover of nature.
* Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

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