My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that… - Henry David Thoreau
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My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before — a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.
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About
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau (12 July 1817 – 6 May 1862) was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.
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Wikimedia Commons, B. D. Maxham (Public domain / CC0)
Also Known As
Birth Name:
David Henry Thoreau
Alternative Names:
Thoreau
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Henry D. Thoreau
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Henry Thoreau
I would say to the readers of the Scriptures, if they wish for a.. good book, read the Bhagavad-Gita .... translated by Charles Wilkins. It deserves to be read with reverence even by yankees .... \" Besides the Bhagvat-Geeta, our Shakespeare seems sometimes youthfully green ... Ex oriente lux may still be the motto of scholars, for the Western world has not yet derived from the East all the light it is destined to derive thence.\"
We soon get through with Nature. She excites an expectation which she cannot satisfy. The merest child which has rambled into a copsewood dreams of a wilderness so wild and strange and inexhaustible as Nature can never show him.
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I am still a learner, not a teacher, feeding somewhat omnivorously, browsing both stalk and leaves; but I shall perhaps be enabled to speak with the more precision and authority by and by, —if philosophy and sentiment are not buried under a multitude of details.
