126
In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.
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127
The place of sorrow is supplied, perchance, by a certain hard and proportionately barren indifference.
128
My saddest and most genuine sorrows are apt to be but transient regrets.
129
Fatal is the discovery that our friend is fallible, that he has prejudices.
Henry David Thoreauverified·Journal, Volume II: 1850-September 15, 1851 (ed. Bradford Torrey)·February 15, 1851
130
Having treated my friend ill, I wished to apologize; but, not meeting him, I made an apology to myself.
Henry David Thoreauverified·Journal, Volume II: 1850-September 15, 1851 (ed. Bradford Torrey)·April 22, 1851
131
My most sacred and memorable life is commonly on awaking in the morning.
Henry David Thoreauverified·Journal, Volume II: 1850-September 15, 1851 (ed. Bradford Torrey)·May 24, 1851
132
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer
133
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation
134
Character, says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms, character is destiny. But not the whole of our destiny.
Wrongly attributed
Character is destiny is routinely credited to Heraclitus, on the strength of a fragment usually given as a man's character is his fate. That translation is itself contested, and the English aphorism does not come from it: it comes from Novalis, and reached English readers through George Eliot, who quotes him here in 1860 and immediately qualifies it. The half everyone drops is the half Eliot wrote.
135
Whether one be fearful or fearless, foolish or wise, troubled or serene, within that soul lies the cause of its own state or states, and never without.
136
To be swayed by your fluctuating thoughts and impulses is to be weak and powerless; to rightly control and direct those forces is to be strong and powerful.
137
Man is a thought-being, and his life and character are determined by the thoughts in which he habitually dwells.
138
If he is perplexed, unhappy, restless, or wretched, let him look to himself, for there and nowhere else is the source of all his trouble.
139
Conscious of my own deficiency, I cannot enter on these duties without great anxiety for the result.
140
If errors have been committed they ought to be corrected; if the policy is sound it ought to be supported.
141
Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously.
142
If national pride is ever justifiable or excusable it is when it springs, not from power or riches, grandeur or glory, but from conviction of national innocence, information, and benevolence.
143
it is nevertheless often true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric
144
Less possessed of your confidence in advance than any of my predecessors, I am deeply conscious of the prospect that I shall stand more and oftener in need of your indulgence.
145
To admit that this picture has its shades is but to say that it is still the condition of men upon earth.
146
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that
147
Between subjection to the will of others and the virtues of self-help and self-government there is a natural incompatibility.
148
Even the commonest men reserve the violent, the sulky, the undisguisedly selfish side of their character for those who have no power to withstand it.
149
A man who is morose or violent to his equals, is sure to be one who has lived among inferiors, whom he could frighten or worry into submission.
150
But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream.