Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862, American writer. A seminal figure in the history of American thought, he spent much of his life in Concord, Massachusetts, where he became associated with the New England transcendentalists and lived for two years on the shore of Walden Pond (1845-1847). His works include Civil Disobedience (1849) and Walden (1854).
One farmer says to me, You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountainhead.
We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!
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 in contact with the more civilized.
Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them.
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