Quotes from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“The universe is wider than our views of it.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“So long as a man is faithful to himself, everything is in his favor, government, society, the very sun, moon, and stars.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“I love a broad margin to my life.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“he rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Flint's pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like; — so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed — him all the shores; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow — there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes — and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way...But lo! men have become the tools of their tools...We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Старость годится в наставники не больше, если не меньше, чем юность, — она не столькому научилась, сколько утратила.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Нам внушают преувеличенное понятие о важности нашей работы, а между тем, как много мы оставляем несделанным!”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Живя в роскоши, ничего не создашь, кроме предметов роскоши, будь то в сельском хозяйстве, торговле, литературе или искусстве.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Я советую вам остерегаться всех дел, требующих нового платья, а не нового человека. Если сам человек не обновился, как может новое платье прийтись ему впору?”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

“Каждое поколение смеется над модами предыдущего, но благоговейно следует новым”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience

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Popular quotes

“I've always been in two minds about women, really. On the one hand, I always liked the fact they had waists, and we hadn't. That aroused in me a feeling of - how shall I put it? - well, pleasure. Yes, pleasurable feelings. Still, on the other hand, they did stab Marat with a penknife, and Marat was Incorruptible, so they shouldn't have stabbed him. That fairly killed off the pleasure. Then again, like Karl Marx, I've always loved women for their little weaknesses - i.e. they've got to sit down to pee, and I've always liked that - that's always filled me with - well, what the hell - a sort of warm feeling. Yes, pleasurable warmth. But then again they did shoot at Lenin, with a revolver no less! And that put a damper on the pleasure as well. I mean, fair enough, sitting down to pee, but shooting at Lenin? That's a sick joke, talking about pleasure after that.

However, I digress.”
― Venedikt Erofeev, quote from Moscow to the End of the Line

“It might have been supposed that Freddy, whose intellect was not of the first order, would have found it impossible to grasp the gist of an extremely tangled and discursive story, but once more the possession of three volatile and excitable sisters stood him in good stead.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Cotillion

“This is textbook Bad Idea. We're driving with a stranger, no one knows where we are, and we have no way of getting in touch with anyone. This is exactly how people become statistics."
"Exactly?" I asked, thinking of all the bizarre twists and turns that had led us to this place.
Ben ceded the point with a sideways shrug. "Maybe not exactly. But still..."
He let it go, and the cab eventually stopped at the edge of a remote, forested area. Sage got out and paid. "Everybody out!"
Ben looked at me, one eyebrow raised. He was leaving the choice to me. I gave his knee a quick squeeze before I opened the door and we piled out of the car.
Sage waited for the cab to drive away, then ducked onto a forest path, clearly assuming we'd follow.
The path through the thick foliage was stunning in the moonlight, and I automatically released my camera from its bag.
"I wish you wouldn't," Sage said without turning around. "You know I'm not one for visitors."
"I'll refrain from selling the pictures to Travel and Leisure, then," I said, already snapping away. "Besides, I need something to take my mind off my feet." My shoes were still on the beach, where I'd kicked them off to dance.
"Hey, I offered to carry you," Sage offered.
"No, thank you."
I suppose I should have been able to move swiftly and silently without my shoes, but I only managed to stab myself on something with every other footfall, giving me a sideways, hopping gait. Every few minutes Sage would hold out his arms, offering to carry me again. I grimaced and denied him each time.
After what felt like about ten miles, even the photos weren't distracting enough. "How much farther?" I asked.
"We're here."
There was nothing in front of us but more trees.
"Wow," Ben said, and I followed his eyes upward to see that several of the tree trunks were actually stilts supporting a beautifully hidden wood-and-glass cabin, set high among the branches. I was immediately charmed.
"You live in a tree house," I said. I aimed my camera the façade, answering Sage's objection before he even said it. "For me, not for Architectural Digest."
"Thank you," Sage said.”
― Hilary Duff, quote from Elixir

“School would be way more tolerable if everyone wasn’t so afraid to be who they really are. And if everyone else would let them.”
― Susane Colasanti, quote from Keep Holding On

“I had to wait for someone special. Someone who would make my heart feel as if it's been trampled by elephants, thrown into the amazon, and eaten by piranhas.”
― Lisa Kleypas, quote from Love in the Afternoon

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