Quote collection
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"Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concretic layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society...may unexpectedly come forth...to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!...Such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn...Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."
"They who assert the purest right, and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State, commonly have not spent much time accumulating property. The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it."
"Men spend the best parts of their lives earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it."
"Every poet has trembled on the verge of science."
"This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge... It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature."
"Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Atheism may comparatively be popular with God himself."
"The Indian...stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison."
"Men reverence one another, not yet God."
"A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful-while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly."
"I never was so rapid in my virtue but my vice kept up with me."
"He is the rich man, and enjoys the fruit of his riches, who summer and winter forever can find delight in his own thoughts."
"When I would go a-visiting, I find that I go off the fashionable street,--not being inclined to change my dress,--to where man meets man, and not polished shoe meets shoe."
"You must have a genius for charity as well as for anything else."
"The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones."
"Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art."
"The present hour is always wealthiest when it is poorer than the future ones, as that is the pleasantest site which affords the pleasantest prospect."
"A man's whole life is taxed for the least thing well done. It is its net result."
"I have travelled a good deal in Concord."
"We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which came and went on the western sky, and the mother-o'-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there."
"Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him."