Walden and Other Writings
Henry David Thoreau
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
“The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.”
“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.”
“Spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.”
“The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”
“Thoreau the “Patron Saint of Swamps” because he enjoyed being in them and writing about them said, “my temple is the swamp… When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most impenetrable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum… I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place…far away from human society. What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty.”
“None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.”
“Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.”
“I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intellegent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as his only AVAILABLE one, thus proving that he is himself AVAILABLE for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought.”
“We know but few man, a great many coats and breeches.”
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Book Keywords:
inspiration, electoral-college, independent-vote, thoreau, conservation, politicians, fashion-quotes, marsh, wetlands, independence, swamp, self-confidence, green, presidency, ecology, inspirational, simplicity, politics
