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The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see forms stretching in frolic gambols across the d...more

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No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to b...more

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What is human warfare but just this an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

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He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.

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It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

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A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferri...more

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For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully though I never received one cent for it.

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What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more.

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When I would recreate myself I seek the darkest wood the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a...more

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To be awake is to be alive.

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I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my b...more

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Simplicity simplicity simplicity! I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand. ... Simplify simplify.

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I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree or a yellow birch or an old acquaintance a...more

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The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

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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...more