"He who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 87 of 139)
2.8K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It is a momentous fact that a man may be good, or he may be bad; his life may be true, or it may be false; it may be either a shame or a glory to him. The good man builds himself up; the bad man destroys himself."
Read quote
3 likes
"You speak of poverty and dependence. Who are poor and dependent? Who are rich and independent? When was it that men agreed to respect the appearance and not the reality?"
Read quote
3 likes
"Fame itself is but an epitaph; as late, as false, as true."
Read quote
3 likes
"History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning ofthings, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,--when did burdock and plantain sprout first?"
Read quote
3 likes
"The researcher is more memorable than the researched."
Read quote
3 likes
"There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know."
Read quote
3 likes
"Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veilhangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating."
Read quote
3 likes
"Such were garrulous and noisy eras, which no longer yield any sound, but the Grecian or silent and melodious era is ever soundingand resounding in the ears of men."
Read quote
3 likes
"The sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust and confusion; and when we meet with any cheering fact which implies the presence of this luminary, we excerpt and modernize it."
Read quote
3 likes
"In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, "memoirs to serve for a history," which is but materials to serve for a mythology."
Read quote
3 likes
"We perceive that the schemers return again and again to common sense and labor. Such is the evidence of history."
Read quote
3 likes
"All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences."
Read quote
3 likes
"If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world's inheritance,... these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story."
Read quote
3 likes
"Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience."
Read quote
3 likes
"We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition."
Read quote
3 likes
"There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knolwedge, Grammatica parda, tawny grammar, a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred."
Read quote
3 likes
"The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly."
Read quote
3 likes
"It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched."
Read quote
3 likes
"No man's thoughts are new, but the style of their expression is the never-failing novelty which cheers and refreshes men. If we were to answer the question, whether the mass of men, as we know them, talk as the standard authors and reviewers write, or rather as this man writes, we should say that he alone begins to write their language at all."
Read quote
3 likes