I cannot but feel compassion when I hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his ‘furniture,’ as whether it is insured or not. ‘But what shall I do with my furniture?’…It would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run.
Quotes from Henry David Thoreau
En tuant le temps on blesse l’éternité.
If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.
It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience. But a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.
No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. <…> Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.
They required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still.
Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could
a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s
eyes for an instant?
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
I love a broad margin to my life.
Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.