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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d2a94b8 | You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this. --Henry David Thoreau | Jay Crownover | ||
| 3e1db4f | God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. | omnipresence | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 54aebe0 | All the world complain now a days of a press of trivial duties & engagements which prevents their employing themselves on some higher ground they know of, - but undoubtedly if they were made of the right stuff to work on that higher ground, provided they were released from all those engagements - they would now at once fulfill the superior engagement, and neglect all the rest, as naturally as they breathe. They would never be caught saying .. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 2b518fb | If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man -- and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages -- it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. | life housing cost | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 6fbebd5 | There is more day left to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 2db7b20 | My practice is "nowhere", my opinion is here." | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| d8eb168 | Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| d64fb99 | Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are. | god | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 0064694 | In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. | present walden thoreau | Henry David Thoreau | |
| d221cb5 | How sweet it would be to treat men and things, for an hour, for just what they are! [...] When we are weary with travel, we lay down our load and rest by the wayside. So, when we are weary with the burden of life, why do we not lay down this load of falsehoods which we have volunteered to sustain, and be refreshed as never mortal was? Let the beautiful laws prevail. Let us not weary ourselves by resisting them. When we would rest our bodies.. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 983c7dd | The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course _a la mode_. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 3aacf2d | It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. | interest | Henry David Thoreau | |
| f141426 | The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. | leisure | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 930837a | It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 50009f8 | La loi n'a jamais rendu les hommes plus justes d'un iota ; et, a cause du respect qu'ils lui marquent, les etres bien disposes eux-meme deviennent les agents de l'injustice. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| f921fd9 | It is a very remarkable and significant fact that though no man is quite well or healthy yet every one believes practically that health is the rule & disease the exception. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| f8f98d3 | Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man, -all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners! | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 67c9bf9 | It is hard to forget that which it is worse than useless to remember. | wisdom memorable | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 7dede93 | Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or streeet, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows, morning and evening, reach farther than their daily steps. We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 6082b83 | It's hard to explain, but it's related to me know that for every moment of beauty this place gives me, I probably miss a thousand more. And I want them all. I swear I'd live on the dunes if I could. I was born out of my time. I should have been around during the end of the eighteenth century, when the Romantic Era kicked off, and writers and artists were obsessed with nature: the ocean, the mountains, the sky. And they believed in following.. | Kirsty Eagar | ||
| 7a7275b | The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 56d320c | The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 0c86d03 | Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man -- a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 4bce7f9 | A distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would recommend to him the profession of a governor. | politicians incompetence | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 914c2c5 | As surely as the sunset in my latest November shall translate me to the ethereal world, and remind me of the ruddy morning of youth; as surely as the last strain of music which falls on my decaying ear shall make age to be forgotten, or, in short, the manifold influences of nature survive during the term of our natural life, so surely my Friend shall forever be my Friend, and reflect a ray of God to me, and time shall foster and adorn and c.. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 0053b47 | I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour. | patriotism | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 95c9a62 | In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake. But an unwavering and commanding virtue would compel even its most fantastic and faintest dreams to respect its ever wakeful authority; as we are accustomed to say carelessly, we should never have dreamed of such a thing. Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| d2627de | There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done .. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 59b31cf | I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly propose to do right; that they were a distinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions, | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 694d6a2 | To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine...So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| d6f4bfa | I've been living out loud the Henry David Thoreau saying: "What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals." The quest of the Cuba" | Diana Nyad | ||
| 4009d9e | 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. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know .. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 54a3539 | In 1881, being on a visit to Boston, my wife and I found ourselves in the Parker House with the 's, and went over to Charleston to hear him lecture. His subject was 'Some Mistakes of Moses,' and it was a memorable experience. Our lost leaders, -- , , Theodore Parker, -- who had really spoken to disciples rather than to the nation, seemed to have contributed something to form this organ by which their voice could reach the people. . The .. | laughter sympathy emotion poetry morality reason imagination friendship humor love truth wisdom inspirational lecture henry-d-thoreau henry-thoreau mirth orator pathos ralph-e-emerson ralph-emerson ralph-waldo-emerson some-mistakes-of-moses henry-david-thoreau ingersoll robert-g-ingersoll robert-green-ingersoll robert-ingersoll emerson memorable praise boston art thoreau simplicity paine thomas-paine tears respect logic honor power speech voice | Moncure Daniel Conway | |
| 3511d81 | Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 39b2e86 | Probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country. And as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worst, and not the better nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit. | newspapers | Henry David Thoreau | |
| c8a2f9c | I have traveled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 54a2124 | If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, "I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico--see if I would go"; and yet these.. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| c8ac054 | I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights -- any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi. | nature philosophy | Henry David Thoreau | |
| d4bcb2c | If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I s.. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| a38b4ee | A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit .. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 905516b | Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| dfd3600 | It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 707215f | 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 | ||
| c3b7ece | Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I c.. | Henry David Thoreau |