My life is like a stroll upon the beach, As…

My life is like a stroll upon the beach,
As near the ocean’s edge as I can go.

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The Fisher’s Boy.

Other Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. - View Quote Details on I never found the companion that was so companionable as…
A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. 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 or far away. - View Quote Details on A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall…
The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church and the Sabbath school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue. Yet I early escaped from their meshes. It was hard to get the commentaries out of one’s head and taste its true flavor. — I think that Pilgrim’s Progress is the best sermon which has been preached from this text; almost all other sermons that I have heard, or heard of, have been but poor imitations of this. — It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians. - View Quote Details on The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess…
I hear beyond the range of sound,
I see beyond the range of sight,
New earths and skies and seas around,
And in my day the sun doth pale his light. - View Quote Details on I hear beyond the range of sound,
I see beyond…
For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation? - View Quote Details on For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right…
We may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read or heard in our day. I do not know why my news should be so trivial, — considering what one’s dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so paltry. The news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition. - View Quote Details on We may well be ashamed to tell what things we…
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. **Walden: Thoreau’s classic account of the two years he spent living in a cabin at Walden Pond. (Non-Fiction, 1854, 251 pages) - View Quote Details on Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth…
His words also were as distinct and true to the ear as those of a great singer, and he had Tennyson ’s splendid gift in this, that he never went back on his tracks to pick up the fallen loops of a sentence as commonplace talkers do. He would hesitate for an instant now and then, waiting for the right word, or would pause with a pathetic patience to master the trouble in his chest, but when he was through the sentence was perfect and entire, lacking nothing, and the word was so purely one with the man that when I read his books now and then I do not hear my own voice within my reading but the voice I heard that day. - View Quote Details on His words also were as distinct and true to the…
The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity, when contrasted with a finer intelligence. - View Quote Details on The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity,…
The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. - View Quote Details on The ways by which you may get money almost without…