Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect...always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished.
I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus.
The Universal Soul, as it is called, has an interest in the stacking of hay, the foddering of cattle, and the draining of peat-meadows.
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.
Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.
To say that God has given a man many and great talents frequently means that he has brought his heavens down within reach of his hands.
What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is.
It is said that a rogue does not look you in the face, neither does an honest man look at you as if he had his reputation to establish.
Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.
The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?
How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden.
When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, [I] submit myself to my instinct to decide for me.
Many college text-books, which were a weariness and stumbling-block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit.
I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.
If some are prosecuted for abusing children, others deserve to be prosecuted for maltreating the face of nature committed to their care.
If you would feel the full force of a tempest, take up your residence on the top of Mount Washington, or at the Highland Light, inTruro.
I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake,I pray?
It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience, but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.
But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.
The child should have the advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge, and is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure.
A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.
O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.
There is one consolation in being sick; and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before.
You must converse much with the field and the woods if you would imbibe such health into your mind and spirit as you covet for your body
Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself.
The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands.
Why should we be startled by death? Life is a constant putting off of the mortal coil - coat, cuticle, flesh and bones, all old clothes.
This is one of those instances in which the individual genius is found to consent, as indeed it always does, at last, with the universal.
The life without men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?
You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.
The lichen on the rocks is a rude and simple shield which beginning and imperfect Nature suspended there. Still hangs her wrinkledtrophy.
Don't spend your time in drilling soldiers, who may turn out hirelings after all, but give to undrilled peasantry a country to fight for.
For a man to act himself, he must be perfectly free; otherwise he is in danger of losing all sense of responsibility or of self- respect.
Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, which in others are luxuries merely and in others still are entirely unknown.
Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her.
What youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside.
I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.
As a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up.
The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.
Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. A perfect work of man's art would also be wild or natural in a good sense.
Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.
The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race.
If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.
No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.
In my cheapest moments I am apt to think that it is n't my business to be "seeking the spirit," but as much its business to be seeking me.