Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Morality
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What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.
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We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice. Where is the skillful swordsman who can give clean wounds, and not rip up his work with the other edge?
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If there were one who lived wholly without the use of money, the State itself would hesitate to demand it of him. But the rich man--not to make any invidious comparison--is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.... Thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet.
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To the innocent there are neither cherubim nor angels.
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To the virtuous man, the universe is the only sanctum sanctorum, and the penetralia of the temple are the broad noon of his existence.
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No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher.
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You cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that which shocks you.
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It becomes the moralist, too, to inquire what man might do to improve and beautify the system; what to make the stars shine more brightly, the sun more cheery and joyous, the moon more placid and content.
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But they who are unconcerned about the consequences of their actions are not therefore unconcerned about their actions.
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Only what is thought, said, or done at a certain rare coincidence is good.
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Many expressions in the New Testament come naturally to the lips of all Protestants, and it furnishes the most pregnant and practical texts. There is no harmless dreaming, no wise speculation in it, but everywhere a substratum of good sense. It never reflects, but it repents. There is no poetry in it, we may say, nothing regarded in the light of beauty merely, but moral truth is its object. All mortals are convicted by its conscience.
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Whatever is, and is not ashamed to be, is good.
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Where there is not discernment, the behavior even of the purest soul may in effect amount to coarseness.
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Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
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Christ was a sublime actor on the stage of the world. He knew what he was thinking of when he said, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." I draw near to him at such a time. Yet he taught mankind but imperfectly how to live; his thoughts were all directed toward another world. There is another kind of success than his. Even here we have a sort of living to get, and must buffet it somewhat longer. There are various tough problems yet to solve, and we must shift to live, betwixt spirit and matter, such a human life as we can.
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Others - as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders - serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few - as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men - serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part.
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Do what you know you ought to do. Why should we ever go abroad, even across the way, to ask a neighbor's advice? There is a nearerneighbor within us incessantly telling us how we should behave. But we wait for the neighbor without to tell us of some false, easier way.
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I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority? Would you have had him wait till that time came?--till you and I came over to him?
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How wholesome winter is, seen far or near; how good, above all mere sentimental, warm-blooded, short-lived, soft-hearted, moral goodness, commonly so called. Give me the goodness which has forgotten its own deeds,--which God has seen to be good, and let be.
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Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end.
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In a thousand apparently humble ways men busy themselves to make some right take the place of some wrong,--if it is only to make abetter paste blacking,--and they are themselves so much the better morally for it.
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To live a better life,--this surely can be done.
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I say, break the law.
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There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of "expediency." There is no such thing as sliding up- hill.In morals the only sliders are backsliders.
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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 highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they were rarely disappointed.
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A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread.
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Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
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A worm is as good a traveler as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper.
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It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always. The conscience really does not, and ought not to monopolizethe whole of our lives, any more than the heart or the head. It is as liable to disease as any other part.
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The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality.
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