Famous quotes containing the words henry david thoreau, henry david, david, thoreau, civil, disobedience, walden and/or years:
“These battles sound incredible to us. I think that posterity will doubt if such things ever were,—if our bold ancestors who settled this land were not struggling rather with the forest shadows, and not with a copper-colored race of men. They were vapors, fever and ague of the unsettled woods. Now, only a few arrowheads are turned up by the plow. In the Pelasgic, the Etruscan, or the British story, there is nothing so shadowy and unreal.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes their widest deductions.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water,—so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“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)
“It has been years since I have seen anyone who could even look as if he were in love. No one’s face lights up any more except for political conversation.”
—Margaret Anderson (1886–1973)