Famous quotes containing the words henry david thoreau, henry david, henry, david, thoreau and/or years:
“What avails it that you are a Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious? I know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites merely.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We admire Chaucer for his sturdy English wit.... But though it is full of good sense and humanity, it is not transcendent poetry. For picturesque description of persons it is, perhaps, without a parallel in English poetry; yet it is essentially humorous, as the loftiest genius never is.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I turned my head and saw the wind,
Not far from where I stood,
Dragging the corn by her golden hair,
Into a dark and lonely wood.”
—William Henry Davies (1871–1940)
“This unlettered man’s speaking and writing are standard English. Some words and phrases deemed vulgarisms and Americanisms before, he has made standard American; such as “It will pay.” It suggests that the one great rule of composition—and if I were a professor of rhetoric I should insist on this—is, to speak the truth. This first, this second, this third; pebbles in your mouth or not. This demands earnestness and manhood chiefly.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I think that for once the Sharp’s rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He worked for twenty years to get his contemporaries to believe—and in the end he succeeded. Meanwhile, however, his adversaries also succeeded: he could no longer believe in himself.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)