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Henry D. Thoreau - Walden

Direct your eye sight inward, and you'll find a thousand regions in your mind yet undiscovered. Travel them and be expert in home cosmography.

What does Africa, what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? Black though it may prove, like the coast when discovered..... Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clarke and Frobisher of your own streams and oceans; explore your own high latitudes....

 Nay be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay.

Obey the precept of the old philosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve.