How earthy old people become --moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.
Author » Thoreau, Henry David
297 posts
Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution --such call I good books.
I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.
I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?
In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.
If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.