601
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 complete collection
The quote database
Every quote we hold, 1549 of them from 213 people across 387 works. Filter it, sort it, and follow any citation back to the source.
1529 checked at source
Filter the collection
Category
Feeling
Attribution
602
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation
603
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
604
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
605
Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children.
606
The doctrines of despair, of spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such as shared the serenity of nature.
607
To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a fountain of health.
608
In society you will not find health, but in nature.
609
Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
610
Entomology extends the limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom.
611
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.
612
There is no short road to the realization of these aspirations.
613
If citizens do not like a law, their duty as honest men and women is to discourage its violation; their right is openly to work for its repeal.
614
The worst evil of disregard for some law is that it destroys respect for all law.
615
Our whole system of self-government will crumble either if officials elect what laws they will enforce or citizens elect what laws they will support.
616
Surely civilization is old enough, surely mankind is mature enough so that we ought in our own lifetime to find a way to permanent peace.
617
The animosities of elections should have no place in our Government, for government must concern itself alone with the common weal.
618
It is not down in any map; true places never are
619
any person haled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him
620
Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.
621
paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell
622
The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.
623
The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.
624
The South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled.
625
The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press