Berchin Quotes
Philip Frenau
"reason's self shall bow the knee / to shadows and delusions here"
The Sculptor's Funeral
"'Brother Elder says Harve was too free with the old man's money - fell short in filial consideration, maybe. Well, we can all remember the very tone in which brother Elder sore his own father was a liar, in the country court; and we all know that the old man came out of great partnership with his son as bare as a sheared lamb. But maybe I'm getting personal, and I'd better be driving ahead at what I want to say.' The lawyer pause a moment, squared his heavy shoulders, and went on: 'Harvey Merrick and I went to school together, back East. We were dead in earnest, and we wanted you all to be proud of us some day. We meant to be great men. I came back here to practice, and I found out that you didn't in the least want me to be a great man. You wanted me to be a shrewd lawyer - oh, yes! Our veteran here wanted me to get him an increase of pension, because he had dyspepsia; Phelps wanted a new county survey that would put the widow Wilson's little bottom far inside the south line; Elder wanted me to lend money at 5 per cent per month, and get it collected; and Stark here wanted to wheedle old women up in Vermont into investing in their annuities in real-estate mortgages that are not worth the paper they are written on. Oh, you needed me hard enough, and you'll go on needing me! Well, I cam back here and became the damned shyster you wanted me to be. You pretend to have some sort of respect for me; and yet you'll stand up and throw mud at Harvey Merrick, whose soul you couldn't dirty and whose hands you couldn't tie. Oh, you're discriminating a lot of Christians! There have been times when the sight of Harvey's name in some Eastern paper has made me hang my head like a whipped dog; and, again, times when I liked to think of him off there in the world, away from all this hog-wallow, climbing the big, clean up-grade he'd set for himself. And we? Now that we've fought and lied and sweated and stolen, and hated as only the disappointed strugglers in a bitter, dead little Western town know how to do, what have we got to show for it? Harvey Merrick wouldn't have given one sunset over your marshes for all you've got put together, and you know it. It's not for me to say why, in the inscrutable wisdom of God, a genius should ever have been called from this place of hatred and bitter water; but I want this Boston man to know that the drivel he's been hearing here tonight is the only tribute any great man could have from such a lot of sick, side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks as the here-present financers of Sand City - upon which town may God have mercy!'"
Huckleberrry Finn
"'Call this govment! why, just look at it and see what its like. Here's the law a-standing ready to take a man's son away from him - a man's own son which he has had all the trouble and all the anxiety and all the expenses of raising. Yes, just as that man has got that son raised at last, and ready to go to work and begin to do suthin' for him and give him a rest, the law up and goes for him. And they call that govment! That ain't all, nuther. The law backs that old Judge Thatcher up and helps him to keep me out o' my own property. Here's what the law does. The law takes a man worth six thousand dollars and upards, and jams him into an old trap of a cabin like this, and lets him go round in his clothes that ain't fitten for a hog. They call that govment! A man can't get his rights in a govment like this. Sometimes I've a moghty notion just to leave this country for good and all. Yes, and I told 'em so: I told old Thatcher so to his face. Lots of 'em heard me, and can tell what I said. Says I, for two cents I'd leave the blamed country and never come anear it again. Them's the very words. I says, look at my hat - if you call it a hat - but the lid raises up and the rest of it goes down till its below my chin, and then it ain't rightly a hat at all, but more like my hear was shoved up through a jint o' stove-pipe. Look at it, says I - such a hat for me to wear - one of the wealthiest men in this town, if I could git my rights. Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free ****** ther, from Ohio; a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in that town that's got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain and a silver-headed cane - the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? they said he was a p'fessor in college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And ain't that the wust. They said he could vote, when he was at home. Well, that lets me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote, myself, if I warn't to drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they'd let that ****** vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote again. Them's the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me - I'll never vote again as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that ****** - why, he wouldn't give me the road if I hadn't shoved him out o' the way. I says to the people, why ain't this ****** put up to auction and sold? - that's what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn't be sold till he'd been in the State six months, and he hadn't been there that long yet. There, now - that's a specimen. They call that a govment that cant sell a free ****** till he's been in the State six months. Here's a govment that calls itself a govment, and thinks itself a govment, and yet's got to set stock-still for six whole months before it can take ahold of a prowling, thieving, infernal white-shirted free ******, and-'"
Life in the Iron Mills
"'Exactly,' rejoined Kirby. 'I do not think. I wash my hands of all social problems, - slavery, caste, white, or black. My duty to my operatives has a narrow limit, - the pay-hour on Saturday night.'"
Robert Frost
"'Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.'"
The Sculptor's Funeral
"'I've been with you gentlemen before,' he began in a dry, even tone, 'when you've sat by coffins of boys born and raised in this town; and, if I remember rightly, you were never any too well satisfied when you checked them up. What's the matter, anyhow? Why is it that reputable young men are as scarce as millionaires in Sand City? It might also seem to a stranger that there was some way something the matter with your progressive town. Why did Ruben Sayer, the brightest young lawyer you ever turned out, after he had come home from the university as straight as die, take to drinking and forge a check and shoot himself? Why did Bill Merrit's son die of the shakes in a saloon in Omaha? Why was Mr. Thomas' son, here, shot it a gambling-house? Why did young Abrams burn his mill to beat the insurance companies and go to the pen?' The lawyer paused and unfolded his arms, laying one clenched fist quietly on the table. 'I'll tell you why. Because you drummed nothing but money and knavery into their ears form the time they wore knickerbockers; because you carped away at them as you've been carping here tonight, holding our friends Phelps and Elder up to them for their models, as our grandfathers held up George Washington and John Adams. But the boys were young, and raw at the business you put them to, and how could they match coppers with such artists as Phelps and Elder? You wanted them to be successful rascals; they were only unsuccessful ones - that's all the difference. There was only one boy ever raised in this borderland between ruffiansim and civilization who didn't come to grief, and you hated Harvey Merrick more for winning out than you hated all the other boys who got under the wheels. Lord, Lord, how you did hate him! Phelps, here, is fond of saying that he could buy and sell us all out any time he's a mind to; but he knew Harve wouldn't have given a tinker's damn for his bank and all his cattlefarms put together; and a lack of appreciation, that way, goes hard with the Phelps.'"
Winter Dreams
"'Look here,' said Dexter, sitting down suddenly, 'I don't understand. You say she was a 'pretty girl' and now you say she's 'all right.' I don't understand what you mean - Judy Jones wasn't a pretty girl, at all. She was a great beauty. Why, I knew her, I knew her. She was-' Devlin laughed pleasantly. 'I'm not trying to start a row,' he said. 'I think Judy's a nice girl and I like her. I can't understand how a man like Joe Simms could fall madly in love with her, but he did.' Then he added, 'Most of the women like her." Dexter looked closely at Devlin, thinking wildly that there must be a reason for this, some insensitivity in the man or some private malice. 'Lots of women fade just-like-that.' Devlin snapped his fingers. 'you must have seen it happen. Perhaps I've forgotten how pretty she was at her wedding. I've seen her so much since then, you see. She has nice eyes.' A sort of dullness settled down upon Dexter. For the first time in his life he felt like getting very drunk. He knew that he was laughing loudly at something Devlin had said but he did now know what it was or why it was funny. When Devlin went, in a few minutes, he lay down on his lounge and looked out the window at the New York skyline into which the sun was sinking in dully lovely shades of pink and gold. He had last thought that having nothing else to lose he was invulnerable at last- but he knew that he had just lost something more, as surely as if he had married Judy Jones and seen her fade away before his eyes. The dream was gone. Something had taken it from him. In a sort of panic he pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes and tried to bring up a picture of the waters lapping at Lake Erminie and the moonlit verandah, and gingham on the gold links and the dry sun and the gold color of her neck's soft down. And her mouth damp to his kisses and her eyes plaintive with melancholy and her freshness like new fine linen in the morning. Why these things were no longer in the world. They had existed and they existed no more. For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down and there was no beauty but the grey beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, or youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished. 'Long ago,' he said, 'long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.'"
Huckleberrry Finn
"'The idea of you lynching anybody! It's amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man! Because you're brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a man? Why, a man's safe in the hands of then thousand of your kind - as long as it's day time and you're not behind him. Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I've lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man's a coward. In the North he lets anybody walk all over him that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it. In the South one man, all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men, in the daytime, and robbed the lot. Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people - whereas you're just as brave, no braver. Why don't your juries hang murderers? Because they're afraid the man's friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark - and it's just what they would do. So they always acquit; and then a man goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back, and lynches the rascal. Your mistake is, that you didn't bring a man with you; that's one mistake, and the other is that you didn't come in the dark, and fetch your masks. You brought part of a man - Buck Harkness, there - and if you hadn't him to start you, you'd a taken it out in a blowing. You didn't want to come. The average man don't like trouble and danger. You don't like trouble and danger. But if only half a man - like Buck Harkness, there - shouts 'Lynch him, lynch him!' you're afraid to back won - afraid you'll be found out to be what you are - cowards - and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves onto that half-a-man's coat tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you're going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is - a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it, is beneath pitifulness. Now the thing for you to do, is droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching's going to be done, it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they'll bring their masks, and fetch a man along. Now leave - and take your half-a-man with you' - tossing his gun up accross his left arm and cocking it, when he says this."
Self-Reliance
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
The Open Boat
"A high cold star on a winter's night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of the situation."
Self-Reliance
"A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace."
American Scholar
"A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."
Self-Reliance
"A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other quite external event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. It can never be so. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."
Resistance to Civil Government
"But if is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn."
Up from Slavery
"A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal, 'Water, water; we dies of thirst!' The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' A second time the signal, 'Water, water; send us water!' ran up from the distressed vessel and was answered, 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: 'Cast down your bucket where you are' - cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded."
Self-Reliance
"A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession,' for he does not postpone his life, but he lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances."
Resistance to Civil Government
"A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote."
American Scholar
"Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential."
Huckleberrry Finn
"After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers; and I was in sweat to find out all about him; but by-and-by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him; because I don't take no stock in dead people."
My Kinsman, Major Molineux
"After the kings of Great Britain has assumed the right of appointing the colonial governors, the measures of the latter seldom met with the ready and general approbation, which had been paid to those of their predecessors, under the original charters. The people looked with most jealous scrutiny to the exercise of power, which did not emanate from themselves, and they usually regarded the rulers with slender gratitude, for the compliances, by which, in softening their instruction from beyond the sea, they had incurred the reprehension of those who gave them."
Bartleby, the Scrivener
"Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity!'
Huckleberrry Finn
"All right, then, I'll go to hell!"
Petrified Man
"Always glad to give the lady what she was after."
Walden
"And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow ran over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, - we never need read of another. One is enough."
The Divinity School Address
"And it is my duty to say to you, that the need was never greater of new revelation than now."
Robert Frost
"And nothing to look backward to with pride, / And nothing to look forward to with hope,"
Self-Reliance
"And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance."
The Crisis, No. 1
"And what is a Tory? Good God! What is he? I should not be afraid to go with a hundred Whigs against a thousand Tories, were they to attempt to get into arms. Every Tory is a coward; for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave."
American Scholar
"Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement is, the new importance given to the single person."
Self-Reliance
"Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will."
Walden
"As for Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility."
Self-Reliance
"As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect."
Walden
"At the present day, and in this country, as I find by my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a trifling cost."
Walden
"Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, our lives must be stripped, and beautiful and housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper."
American Scholar
"Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst."
American Scholar
"Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth - learn the amount of this influence more conveniently - by considering their value alone."
Self-Reliance
"But do your thing, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's bluff is in this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument."
Petrified Man
"If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"
Common Sense
"But if you say, you can still pass these violations over, then I ask, hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name of husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the hear of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant."
Resistance to Civil Government
"But in this case the State has provided no way: its very Constitution is evil."
The Sculptor's Funeral
"But it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we came from, in the end"
Huckleberrry Finn
"But it warn't. it was Jack-o-lanterns, or lightning-bugs; so he set down again, and went to watching, same as before. Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom. Well, I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I begun to get it through my head that he was most free - and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn't get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. it got to troubling me so I couldn't rest; I couldn't stay still in one place. It hadn't ever come home to be before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it staid with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I warn't to blame, because I didn't rum jim off from his rightful owner, but it warn's no use, conscience up and says every time, 'But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.' That was so - I couldn't get around that, noway. That was where it pinched. Conscience says to me. 'What had poor Miss Watson done to you, that you could see her ****** go off right under your eyes and never say one single word? What did that poor old woman do to you, that you could treat her so mean? Why, she tried to learn you your book, she tried to learn you your manners, she tried to be good to you every way she knowed how. That's what she done.' I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wished I was dead. I fidgeted up and down the raft, abusing myself to myself, and Jim was fidgeting up and down past me. We neither of us could keep still. Every time he danced around and says, 'Dah's Cairo!' it went through me like a shot, and I thought if it was Cairo I reckoned I would die of miserableness. Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. He was saying how first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn't sell them, they'd get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them. It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn't ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying, 'give a ****** an inch and he'll take an ell.' Thinks I, this is what come of my not thinking. Here was this ****** which I had as good as helped run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children - children that belonged to a man I didn't even know; a man that had never done me no harm."
Common Sense
"But let our imaginations transport us a few moments to Boston; that seat of wretchedness will teach us wisdom, and instruct us forever to renounce a power in whom we can have no trust. The inhabitants of that unfortunate city, who but a few months ago were in ease and affluence, have now no other alternative than to stay and starve, or turn out and beg."
Self-Reliance
"But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future."
Self-Reliance
"But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness, as soon as he once acted or spoken with éclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds whose affections must now enter into his account."
Huckleberrry Finn
"But this time I somehow got to talking to him about his wife and young ones; and by-and-by he says: 'What makes me feel so bad dis time, 'uz bekase I hear sumpn over yonder on de bank like a whack, er a slame, while ago, en it mine me er de time I treat my little 'Lizabeth so ornery. She warn't on'y 'bout fo' year ole, en she tuck de sk'yarlet-fever, en had a powerful rough spell; but she got well, en one day she was a-stannin' aroun', en I says to her, I says: 'Shet de do'.' 'She never done it; jis' stood dar, kiner smilin' up at me. It make me mad; en I says agin, mighty loud, I says: 'Doan' you hear me? - shet de do'!' She jis' stood de same way, kiner smilin' up. I was a-bilin'! I says: 'I lay I make you mine!' en wid dat I fetch' her a slap side de head dat sont her a-sprawlin'. Den I went into de yuther room, en 'uz gone 'bout ten minutes; en when I came back, dah was dat do' a-stannin' open yit, en dat chile stannin' mos' right in it, a-lookin' down and mournin', en de tears runnin' down. My, but I wuz mad, I was agwyne for de chile, but jis' den - it was a do' dat open inerds - jis' den, 'long come de wind en slam it to, behine the chile, ker-blam! - en my lan' de chile never move'! My breff mos' hop outer men; en I feel so - so - I doan' know how I feel. I crope out, all a-tremblin' en crope aroun' en open de do' easy en slow, en pole my head in behine de chile, sof' en still, en all uv a sudden, I says pow! jis' as loud as I could yell. She never budge! Oh, Huck, I burst out a-cryin' en grab her up in my arms, en say, 'Oh, de po' little thing! de Lord God Almighty forgive po' ole Jim, kaze he bever gwyne to forgive hisself as long's he live!' oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plumb deef en dumb - en I'd ben a'treat'n her so!"
The Souls Black Folk
"But when to earth and brute is added an environment of men and ideas, then the attitude of the imprisoned group may take three main forms, a feeling of revolt and revenge, and attempt to adjust all thought and action to the will of the greater group; or, finally, a determined effort at self-realization and self-development despite environing opinion."
Gettysburg Address
"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow - this ground."
The Souls Black Folk
"But, nevertheless, they insist that the way to truth and right lies in a straight-forward honesty, not in indiscriminate flattery; in praising those of the South who do well and criticizing uncompromisingly those who do ill; in taking advantage of the opportunities at hand and urging their fellows to do the same, but at the same, but at the same time in remembering that only a firm adherence to their higher ideals and aspirations will ever keep those ideals within the realm of possibility. They do not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will come in a moment; they do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys."
Resistance to Civil Government
"This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people."
Resistance to Civil Government
"But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no-government, but a better government."
Walden
"By the words necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that men obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether form savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it."
Winter Dreams
"Dexter knew that there was something dismal about this northern spring, just as he knew there was something gorgeous about the fall. Fall made him clench his hands and tremble and repeat idiotic sentences to himself and make brisk abrupt gestures of command to imaginary audiences and armies. October filled him with hope which November raised to a sort of ecstatic triumph, and in this wood the fleeting brilliant impressions of the summer at Lake Erminie were ready grist to his will. He became a golf champion and defeated Mr. TA Hendrick in a marvelous match played over a hundred times in the fairways of his imagination, a match each detail of which he changed about untiringly - sometimes winning with almost laughable ease, sometimes coming up magnificently from behind. Again, stepping from a Pierce-Arrow automobile, like Mr. Mortimer Jones, he strolled frigidly into the lounge of the Erminie Golf Club - or perhaps, surrounded by an admiring crowd, he gave an exhibition of fancy diving from the springboard of the Erminie Club raft.... Among the most impressed was Mr. Mortimer Jones. And one day it came to pass that Mr. Jones, himself and not his ghost came up to Dexter, almost with tears in his eyes and said that Dexter was the ---- best caddy in the club and wouldn't he decide not to quit if Mr. Jones made it worth while, because every other ---- caddy in the club lost one ball a hole for him - regularly -'"
Walden
"Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society. If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the would world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me."
Letter III
"Do you think that the monarchial ingredients which are more prevalent in other government have purged them from all foul stains? Their histories assert the contrary"
American Scholar
"Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this."
Common Sense
"Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe."
The Blue Hotel
"Every sin is the result of a collaboration."
Letter III
"Everything has tended to regenerate them; new laws, a new mode of living, a new social system; here they are become men: in Europe they were so many useless plants, wanting vegetative mold and refreshing showers; they withered, and were mowed down by want, hunger, and war; but no by the power of transplantation, like all other plants they have taken root and flourished."
Benito Cereno
"Follow your leader."
Walden
"For a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone."
Walden
"For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it."
Self-Reliance
"For non-conformity the world whips you with displeasure."
American Scholar
"Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds."
Good Country People
"Good country people are the salt of the earth."
Robert Frost
"Good fences make good neighbors."
Self-Reliance
"Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good humored flexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side."
Life in the Iron Mills
"Has the power of its desperate need commanded the darkness away? While the room is yet steeped in heavy shadow, a cool, gray light suddenly touches its head like a blessing hand, and its groping arm points through the broken cloud to the far East, where, in the flickering, nebulous crimson, God has set the promise of the Dawn."
The Sculptor's Funeral
"He could not help wondering what link there had been between the porcelain vessel and so sooty a lump of potter's clay."
Resistance to Civil Government
"He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist."
Self-Reliance
"He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows odd even in youth among old things."
Walden
"How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity."
How it Feels to Be Colored Me
"I am not tragically colored."
Up from Slavery
"I am often asked to express myself more freely than I do upon the political condition and the political future of my race. These recollections of my experience in Atlanta give me the opportunity to do so briefly. My own belief is, although I have never before said in so many words, that the time will come when the Negro and the South will be accorded all the political rights which his ability, character, and material possessions entitle him to. I think, though, that the opportunity to freely exercise such political rights will not come in any large degree through outside or artificial forcing, but will be accorded to the Negro by Southern white people themselves, and that they will protect him in the exercise of those rights. Just as soon as the South gets over the old feeling that it is being forced by "foreigners," or "aliens," to do something which it does not want to do, I believe that the change in the direction that I have indicated is going to begin. In fact, there are indications that it is already beginning in a slight degree."
Up from Slavery
"I believe it is the duty of the Negro - as the greater part of the race is already doing - to deport himself modestly in regard to political claims, depending on the slow but sure influences that process from the possession of property, intelligence, and high character for the full recognition of his political rights. I think that the according of the full exercise of political rights is going to be a matter of natural, slow growth, not an over-night, gourd-vine affair. I do not believe that the Negro should cease voting, for a man cannot learn the exercise of self-government by ceasing to vote, any more than a boy can learn to swim by keeping out of the water, but I do believe that in his voting he should more and more be influenced by those of intelligence and character who are his next-door neighbors."
Common Sense
"I challenge the warmest advocate for reconciliation to show a single advantage that this continent can reap by being connected with Great Britain. I repeat this challenge; not a single advantage is derived. Our corn will fetch its price in any market in Europe, and our imported goods must be paid for buy them where we will."
Walden
"I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."
Self-Reliance
"I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle."
Huckleberrry Finn
"I got into my old rags, and my sugarhogshead again, and was free and satisfied."
Common Sense
"I have heard it asserted by some, that as America has flourished under her former connection with Great Britain, the same connection is necessary towards her future happiness, and will always have the same effect. Nothing can be more fallacious than this kind of argument. We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat, or that the first twenty years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next twenty."
American Scholar
"I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties."
Walden
"I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one."
Robert Frost
"I know just how it feels / To think of the right thing to say too late."
American Scholar
"I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lied behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of t-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the workyard made."
Self-Reliance
"I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways."
How it Feels to Be Colored Me
"I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame."
Self-Reliance
"I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me."
Walden
"I sometimes wonder the we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle master that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worse of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself."
The Blue Hotel
"I suppose there have been a good many men killed in this room."
Walden
"I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but of one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?"
Sherwood Anderson
"I turn once more to those who sneer at / this my city, and I give them back the sneer"
Huckleberrry Finn
"I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft."
Walden
"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 a life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to life deep and such out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and save close, to drive life into a corned, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."
Bartleby, the Scrivener
"I would prefer not to."
Resistance to Civil Government
"I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined."
The Open Boat
"If I am going to be drowned, why in the name of the 7 seas was I allowed to contemplate on sand and trees? Was I brought here to be dragged away from the sacred cheese of life?"
Letter III
"If thou wilt carefully educate thy children, teach them gratitude to God, and reverence to that government, the philanthropic government, which has collected here so many men and made them happy."
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
"If you have to go away, is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind?"
Self-Reliance
"If, therefore, a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not."
Up from Slavery
"In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."
The Souls Black Folk
"In his failure to realize and impress this last point, Mr. Washington is especially to be criticized. His doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro's shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs."
American Scholar
"In its essence, it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius."
Resistance to Civil Government
"In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact, that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army."
Walden
"In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. 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."
American Scholar
"In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be, - free and brave."
American Scholar
"In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking."
The Souls Black Folk
"In the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preaches at such crises has been that many self-respect is worth more than lands or houses, and that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not worth civilizing. In answer to this, it has been claimed that the Negro can survive only through submission. Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things, - first, political power, second, insistence on civil rights, third, higher education of the negro youth, - and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred: 1. The disenfranchisement of the Nergo. 2. The legal creation of a distinct statues of civil inferiority for the Negro. 3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro."
Common Sense
"In this extensive quarter of the globe, we forget the narrow limits of three hundred and sixty miles (the extent of England) and carry our friendship on a larger scale; we claim brotherhood with every European Christian, and triumph in the generosity of the sentiment."
American Scholar
"Inaction is cowardice."
Self-Reliance
"Insist on yourself; never imitate."
Resistance to Civil Government
"It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State, than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case."
Robert Frost
"It is also great / And would suffice."
Self-Reliance
"It is for want of self-culture that the idol of Traveling, the idol of Italy, of England, of Egypt, remains for all educated Americans."
Resistance to Civil Government
"It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support."
Self-Reliance
"It is only as a man puts off from himself all external support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail."
Gettysburg Address
"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
The Divinity School Address
"It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; the He speaketh not spake."
Resistance to Civil Government
"It will not be worth the wile to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again. You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend on yourself, always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs."
Defender of the Faith
"It's what he's got here, guts."
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
"The bow of God's wrath is bemt, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends that arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood."
Resistance to Civil Government
"The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way."
Self-Reliance
"The civilized man has built a coach, but he has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but loses so much support of muscle."
Huckleberrry Finn
"Jim looked at the trash, and then looked at me, and back at the trash again. He had got the dream fixed so strong in his head that he couldn't seem to shake it loose and get the facts back to its place again, right away. But when he did get the thing straightened around, he looked at me steady, without ever smiling, and says: 'What do dey stan' for? I's gwyne to tell you. When I fot all wore out wid work, en wid de callin' for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos' broke bekase you wuz los' en I didn' k'yer no mo' what become er me en de raf'. En when I wake up en fine you back agin', all safe en soun' de tears come en I could a got down on my knees en kiss' yo' foot I's so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin' 'bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed.' Then he got up slow, and walked to the wigwam, and went in there without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back. It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up t go and humble myself to a ****** - but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't done that one if I'd a knowed it would make him feel that way."
Invisible Man
"Keep this ******-boy running."
The Crisis, No. 1
"Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer from the misery of devils were I to make a ***** of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a cattish, stupid stubborn, worthless, brutish man."
American Scholar
"Life is our dictionary."
William Carlos Williams
"Lifeless in appearance, sluggish / dazed spring approaches-"
American Scholar
"Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times."
Letter III
"Men are like plants; the goodness and flavor of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow. We are nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the climate we inhabit, the government we obey, the system of religion we profess, and the nature of our employment. Here you will find but few crimes; these have acquired as yet no root among us."
The Divinity School Address
"Men have come to speak on the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead."
Life in the Iron Mills
"Miserable enough she looked, lying there on the ashes like a limp, dirty rag, - yet not an unfitting figure to crown the scene of hopeless discomfort and veiled crime: more fitting, if one looked deeper into the heart of things, - at her thwarted woman's form, her colorless life, her waking stupor that smothered pain and hunger, - even more fit to be a type of her class. Deeper yet if one could look, was there nothing worth reading in this wet, faded thing, half covered with ashes? no story of a soul filled with groping passionate love, heroic unselfishness, fierce jealousy? of years of weary trying to please the one human being whom she loved, to gain one of real heart-kindness form him? If anything like this were hidden beneath the pale, bleared eyes, and dull, washed-out-looking face, no one had ever taken the trouble to read its faint signs: not the half-clothed furnace-tender, Wolfe, certainly. Yet he was kind to her: it was his nature to be kind, even to the very rats that swarmed in the cellar: kind to her in just the same way. She knew that. And it might be that very knowledge had given to her face its apathy and vacancy more than her low, torpid life."
Resistance to Civil Government
"Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one already."
Walden
"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only indispensible, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind."
Walden
"Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought."
Second Inaugural Address
"Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease."
The Crisis, No. 1
"Neither have I so much of the infidel in me as to suppose that He has relinquished to government of the world, and given us up to the care of the devils; and as I do not, I cannot see on what grounds the King of Britain can look up to heaven for help against us: a common murderer, a highwayman, or a housebreaker has as good pretense as he."
The Sculptor's Funeral
"Next day Jim Laird was drunk and unable to attend the funeral services. Steavens called twice at his office, but was compelled to start to the East without seeing him. He has a presentiment that he would hear from him again, and left his address on the lawyer's table; but if Laird found it, he never acknowledged it. The thing in him that Harvey Merrick had loved must have gone under ground with Harvey Merrick's coffin; for it never spoke again, and Jim got the cold he died of driving across the Colorado mountains to defend one of Phelps' sons who had gotten into trouble out there by cutting government timber."
Self-Reliance
"No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it."
Walden
"No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean an unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience."
Common Sense
"Not one third of the inhabitants, even of this province, are of English descent. Wherefore, I reprobate the phrase of parent or mother country applied to England only, as being false, selfish, narrow, and ungenerous."
Good Country People
"Nothing is perfect! That is life! Other people have opinions too!"
Barn Burning
"The element of fire spoke to some deep mainspring on father's being, like steel or powder to others."
American Scholar
"The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature."
American Scholar
"This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it."
The Souls Black Folk
"Notwithstanding this, it is equally true to assert that on the whole the distinct impression left by Mr. Washington's propaganda is, first, that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because of the Negro's degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro's failure to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his future rise depends primarily on his own efforts. Each of these propositions is a dangerous half-truth. The supplementary truths must never be lost sight of: first, slavery and race prejudice are potent if not sufficient causes of the Negro's position; second, industrial and common-school training were necessarily slow in planting because they had to await the black teachers trained by higher institutions, - it being extremely doubtful if any essentially different development was possible, and certainly a Tuskegee was unthinkable before 1880; and, third, while it is a great truth to say that the Negro must strive and strive mightily to help himself, it is equally true that unless his striving be not simply seconded, but rather aroused and encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and wiser environing group, he cannot hope for great success."
Gettysburg Address
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure."
Huckleberrry Finn
"Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he'd got to be a slave, and so I'd better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon gave up that notion, for two things: she'd be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her, and so she'd sell him straight down the river again; and if she didn't, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful ******, and they'd make Jim feel it all the time, and so he'd feel ornery and disgraced. And then think of me! It would get all around, that Huck Finn helped a ****** get his freedom; and if I was to ever see anybody from that town again, I'd be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That's just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain't no disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this, the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it his me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman's ****** that hadn't ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there's One that's always on the lookout, and ain't going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I must dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself, by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn't so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, 'There was the Sunday school, you could a gone to it; and if you'd a done it they'd a learnt you, there, that people that acts as I'd been acting about the ****** goes to everlasting fire.' It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray; and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind of boy I was, and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart wasn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but take away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and clean thing, and go and write to that ******'s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie - and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie - I found that out. So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and I didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, ill go and write the letter - and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt light as a feather, right straight off, and all my troubles gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote: Miss Watson your runaway ****** Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville and Mr. Phelps had got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. Huck Finn I felt good and all washed and clean of sin for the first time I have ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking - thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I came back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: 'All right, then, I'll go to hell!' - and tore it up. It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. and for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog"
Walden
"Our life is frittered away by detail."
Self-Reliance
"Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the traveling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our whole minds lean, and follow the Past and the Distant, as the eyes of a maid follow her mistress."
Walden
"Perhaps it seemed to me that I have more several lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one."
Walden
"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."
Defender of the Faith
"Resting with all my will an impulse to turn and seek pardon for my vindictiveness, I accepted my own ((fate))."
Self-Reliance
"Rough and graceless would be such a greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affection of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it - else it be none."
The Crisis, No. 1
"Say not that this is revenge; call it rather the soft resentment of a suffering people, who, having no object in view but the good of all, have staked their own all upon a seemingly doubtful event."
Up from Slavery
"Say what we will, there is something in human nature which we cannot blot out, which makes on man, in the end, recognize and reward merit in one another, regardless of colour or race."
Walden
"Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe."
The Open Boat
"She did not seem cruel to him, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent."
Walden
"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail."
How it Feels to Be Colored Me
"Slavery is the price I pair for civilization.... Worth all that I have paid."
Self-Reliance
"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members."
Walden
"Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul."
Letter III
"The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they are incorporated into one of the finest systems of populations which has ever appeared, and which will hereafter become distinct by the power of the different climates they inhabit."
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire."
The Divinity School Address
"The Puritans in England and America, found in the Christ of the Catholic Church, and in the dogmas inherited from Rome, scope for their austere piety, and their longings for civil freedom."
Resistance to Civil Government
"The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to, - for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well, - is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward true respect for the individual. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of a man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own response, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind off fruit, and suffered to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious, State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen."
Phillis Wheatley
"fixed are the eyes of the nations on the scales / for in their hopes Columbia's arm prevails"
The Crisis, No. 1
"The heart that feels not now is dead: the blood of his children will curse his cowardice who shrinks back at a time when a little might have saved the whole, and made them happy."
Letter III
"The inhabitants of Canada, Massachusetts, the middle provinces, the southern ones will be as different as their climates; their only points of unit will be those of religion and language."
Resistance to Civil Government
"The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistent expediency. Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing. He well deserves to be called, as he has been called, the Defender of the Constitution. There are really no blows to be given by him but defensive ones. He is not a leader, but a follower. His leaders are the men of 1787. 'I have never made an effort,' he says, 'and never propose to make an effort; I have countenanced and effort, and never mean to countenance an effort, to disturb the arrangement as originally made, by which the various states came into the Union.' Still thinking of the sanction which the Constitution gives to slavery, he says, 'Because it was part of the original compact, - let it stand.' Notwithstanding his special acuteness and ability, he is unable to take a fact our of its merely political relations, and behold it as lies absolutely to be disposed of by the intellect."
American Scholar
"The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time."
The Divinity School Address
"The man whom the soul descends, through whom the soul speaks, alone can teach."
Walden
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
Common Sense
"The most sanguine in Britain doth not think so. The utmost stretch of human wisdom cannot, at this time, compass a plan, short of separation, which can promise the continent even a year's security."
American Scholar
"The one thing in the world of value, is, the active soul, - the soul, free sovereign, active."
American Scholar
"The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statue-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship."
No Name Woman
"The real punishment was not the raid... but the family's deliberate forgetting of her."
American Scholar
"The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, - a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man."
The Storm
"The storm passed and everyone was happy."
Walden
"The student who secures his coveted leisure by retirement and systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. 'But,' says one, 'you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?' I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live if from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common worse, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where any thing is professed and practiced but the art of life; - to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made; or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in is eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of the month, - the boy who had mad his own jack-knife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this, - or the boy who had attended the lectured on metallurgy at the Institute in the mean while, and had received a Rodgers penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers? - To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation! - why, if I had take one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor student studies and is only taught political economy, while the economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably."
Common Sense
"The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth."
Up from Slavery
"The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that my progress is the enjoyment of all privileges that will come to us must be the result of sever and constant struggle rather than artificial forcing."
Gettysburg Address
"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here."
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
"The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber; the pit it prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them the flames do now rage and glow. The glittering sword is whet, and held over them, and the pit hath opened its mouth under them."
Self-Reliance
"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that thought the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."
Walden
"There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness."
American Scholar
"There is then creative reading, as well as creative writing."
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
"They are as great heaps of light chaff before the whirlwind; or large quantities of dry stubble before devouring flames."
Resistance to Civil Government
"They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its seam no higher, stand, and wisely stand, but the Bible and the Constitution, and the drink at it there with reverence and humility; more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head."
Common Sense
"This is not inflaming or exaggerating matters, but trying them by those feelings and affections which nature justifies."
Resistance to Civil Government
"Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his sense. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength."
Self-Reliance
"To be great is to be misunderstood."
Self-Reliance
"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you is true in your private heart, its true for all men, - that is genius."
Self-Reliance
"Trust thyself"
Resistance to Civil Government
"Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey the, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once."
The Blue Hotel
"Usually there are from a dozen to forty women really involved in every murder."
Langston Hughes
"Way Down South in Dixie"
Gettysburg Address
"We are met on a great battle field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field."
Letter III
"We are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free as he ought to be."
Common Sense
"We have boasted the protection of Great Britain without considering that her motive was interest not attachment; and that she did not protect us form out enemies on our account, and who will always be our enemies on the same account."
Huckleberrry Finn
"Well, I got a good going-over in the morning, from old Miss Watson, on account of my clothes; but the widow she didn't scold but only cleaned off the grease and clay and looked so sorry that I thought I would behave a while if I could. Them Miss Watson she took me into the closet and prayed, but nothing came of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn't so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn't any god without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn't make it work. By-and-by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I couldn't make it out no way. I set down, one time, back in the woods and had a long think about it. I says to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for, why don't Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork? Why can't the widow get back her silver snuff-box that was stole? Why can't Miss Watson fat up? No, says I to myself, their ain't nothing in it. I went and told the widow about it, and she said the thing a body could get for praying was "spiritual gifts." This was too many for me, but she told me what she meant - I must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never thing about myself. This was including Miss Watson, as I took it. I went out into the woods and turned it over in my minds a long time, but I couldn't see no advantage about it - except for the other people - so at last I reckoned I wouldn't worry about it any more, but I just let it go. Sometimes the widow would take me one side and talk about Providence in a way to make a boy's mouth water; but maybe next day Miss Watson would take hold and knock it all down again I judged I could see that there was two Providences, a poor chap would stand considerable to show with the widow's Providence, but if Miss Watson's got him there warn't no help for him any more. I thought it all out, and reckoned I would belong to the widow's, if he wanted me, though I couldn't make out how he was agoing to be any better off then than what he was before, seeing I was so ignorant and so kind of low-down and ornery."
Self-Reliance
"Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars."
Huckleberrry Finn
"Well, one thing was dead sure; and that was, that Tom Sawyer was in earnest and was actually going to help steal that ****** out of slavery. That was the thing that was too many for me. Here was a boy that was respectable, and well brung up; and he had a character to lose; and folks at home that had characters; and he was bright and not leather-headed; and knowing and not ignorant; and not mean, but kind; and yet here he was, without any more pride, or rightness, or feeling, than to stoop to this business, and make himself a shame, and his family a shame, before everybody. I couldn't understand it, no way at all. It was outrageous, and I knowed I ought to just up and tell him so; and so be his true friend, and let him quit the thing right where he was, and save himself. And I did start to tell him, but he shut me up and says: 'Don't you reckon I know what I'm about? Don't I generally know what I'm about?'"
Walden
"When he as obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil."
The Open Boat
"When if came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on the shore and they felt that they could be interpreters."
The Open Boat
"When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important and that she feels she would not main the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples."
American Scholar
"When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when the thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books are weariness, - he has always the resource to live."
The Divinity School Address
"Wherever a man comes, there comes a revolution."
Self-Reliance
"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist."
Walden
"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."
Second Inaugural Address
"With malice toward none; and charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in."
Common Sense
"Ye that oppose independence now, ye know not what ye do: ye are opening a door to eternal tyranny by keeping vacant the seat of government."
Common Sense
"Ye that tell us of harmony and reconciliation, can ye restore to us the time that is past" Can ye give to prostitution its former innocence?"
Walden
"Yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries."
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
"You are ten times more abominable in His eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours."
Huckleberrry Finn
"You can't pray a lie."
The Crisis, No. 1
• "I once felt all that kind of anger, which a man ought to feel, against the mean principles that are held by the tories: a noted one, who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his had, about eight or nine years old, as I never saw, and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, "Well! Give me peace in my day." Not a man lives on this continent but fully believes that a separation must some time or another finally take place, and a generous parent should have said, "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace"; and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty."
The Crisis, No. 1
• "Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have included me to support and offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to "bind me in all cases whatsoever" to his absolute will, am I to suffer it? What signifies it to me, whether he who does it is a king or a common man; my countryman or not my countryman; whether it be done by an individual villain, or an army of them? If we reason to the root of things we shall find no difference; neither can any just cause be assigned why we should punish in the one case and pardon in the other. Let them call me a rebel, and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils were I to make a ***** of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man."
The Souls Black Folk
• "They know that the low social level of the mass of the race is responsible for much discrimination against it, but they also know, and the nation knows, that relentless color-prejudice is more often a cause than a result of the Negro's degradation."
