"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience."

Thoreau, Henry David on inspiration
5 fans of this quote   

"A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight."

Thoreau, Henry David on minorities   

"Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world."

Thoreau, Henry David on nations   

"There is no remedy for love than to love more."

Thoreau, Henry David on love
29 fans of this quote   

"Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth."

Thoreau, Henry David on poverty and the poor   

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"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment."

Thoreau, Henry David on present
11 fans of this quote   

"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."

Thoreau, Henry David on public opinion   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"Many men go fishing their entire lives without knowing it is not fish they are after."

Thoreau, Henry David on purpose
6 fans of this quote   

"Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured and far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak."

Thoreau, Henry David on purpose
60 fans of this quote   

"Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it."

Thoreau, Henry David on rules
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"After the first blush of sin comes its indifference."

Thoreau, Henry David on sin
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"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. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion."

Thoreau, Henry David on life
7 fans of this quote   

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

Thoreau, Henry David on desperation
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This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark."

Thoreau, Henry David on determination
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"Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe."

Thoreau, Henry David on doubt
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"You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds."

Thoreau, Henry David on eccentricity
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"We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same."

Thoreau, Henry David on fashion
3 fans of this quote   

"That government is best which governs least."

Thoreau, Henry David on government
3 fans of this quote   

"We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on education
21 fans of this quote   

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on education
18 fans of this quote   

"Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on education
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"If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on discovery
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"When it is dark enough, you can see the stars."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on difficulties
53 fans of this quote   

"Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on destiny
40 fans of this quote   

"I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of goodwill. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy, and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity. "

King Jr. Martin Luther on uncategorised   

"Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine"

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on adversity
63 fans of this quote   

"Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on decisions
51 fans of this quote   

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on achievement
191 fans of this quote   

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on achievement
102 fans of this quote   

"Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on change   

"O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?"

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on winter
4 fans of this quote   

"War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on war   

"Life may change, but it may fly not; Hope may vanish, but can die not; Truth be veiled, but still it burneth; Love repulsed, -- but it returneth."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on change
6 fans of this quote   

"There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!"

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on autumn
3 fans of this quote   

"Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on love   

"All love is sweet, Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever. They who inspire is most are fortunate, As I am now: but those who feel it most Are happier still."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on love
3 fans of this quote   

"Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on government
3 fans of this quote   

"The dice of God are always loaded."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on god
3 fans of this quote   

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. "

King Jr. Martin Luther on uncategorised
8 fans of this quote   

"Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meaning can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart. Such is the moment I am presently experiencing. I experience this high and joyous moment not for myself alone but for those devotees of nonviolence who have moved so courageously against the ramparts of racial injustice and who in the process have acquired a new estimate of their own human worth. Many of them are young and cultured. Others are middle aged and middle class. The majority are poor and untutored. But they are all united in the quiet conviction that it is better to suffer in dignity than to accept segregation in humiliation. These are the real heroes of the freedom struggle: they are the noble people for whom I accept the Nobel Peace Prize. "

King Jr. Martin Luther on the future
3 fans of this quote