Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.
("Walden, or Life in the Woods")
More Quotes from Henry David Thoreau:
Our thought are the epochs in our lives all else is but a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.Henry David Thoreau
Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.
Henry David Thoreau
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent. . .
Henry David Thoreau
Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.
Henry David Thoreau
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.
Henry David Thoreau
For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it.
Henry David Thoreau
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