"It's the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us. The question is not what you look at but what you see."
"See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate."
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Source: Henry David Thoreau (2004). “Walden: 150th Anniversary Illustrated Edition of the American Classic”, p.5, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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