Famous quotes containing the words henry david thoreau, henry david, henry, david, thoreau, civil, disobedience, walden and/or years:
“We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,—at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this is?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The great end of life is not knowledge, but action. What men need is as much knowledge as they can assimilate and organize into a basis for action; give them more and it may become injurious. One knows people who are as heavy and stupid from undigested learning as other are from over-fulness of meat and drink.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“It was all smoke, and no salt, Attic or other.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In my experience, persons, when they are made the subject of conversation, though with a Friend, are commonly the most prosaic and trivial of facts. The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the character of individuals. Our discourse all runs to slander, and our limits grow narrower as we advance. How is it that we are impelled to treat our old Friends so ill when we obtain new ones?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even one hundred defeats.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“A country losing touch with its own history is like an old man losing his glasses, a distressing sight, at once vulnerable, unsure, and easily disoriented.”
—George Walden (b. 1939)
“Then for years and years
And for miles and miles
‘Cross the Aegean Isles,
Athens, Rome, France, Britain,
Always West-Northwest ...”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)