The quote database

Theirs is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it.

The strong man who in the confidence of sturdy health courts the sternest activities of life and rejoices in the hardihood of constant labor may still have lurking near his vitals the unheeded disease that dooms him to sudden collapse.

The tedium of that work is hard to conceive.

There are, however, times when I long to sweep away half the things I am expected to learn; for the overtaxed mind cannot enjoy the treasure it has secured at the greatest cost.

To love, to dream, to feel, to learn, to understand--all these are possible to me if only I may be relieved from willing.

What to the intellect is old and worn-out is perennially young and fresh to the heart; curiosity is insatiable, but love is never tired.

To sleep is to strain and purify our emotions, to deposit the mud of life, to calm the fever of the soul

The place of sorrow is supplied, perchance, by a certain hard and proportionately barren indifference.

How to make the getting our living poetic! for if it is not poetic, it is not life but death that we get.

Our life is frittered away by detail

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation

In society you will not find health, but in nature.

Concentration is an aid to the doing of something; it is not the doing of something in itself.

Huxley declares that the sense of uselessness is the severest shock which the human system can sustain, and that if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy of function.

Thousands of God's wild blessings will search you and soak you as if you were sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted.

Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.

Fatigue yourself, but once, to utter exhaustion, and to the end of life you shall not recover the former vigour of your frame.

Let heart-sickness pass beyond a certain bitter point, and the heart loses its life for ever.

I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means?

At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.

But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream.

The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it.

A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it.