Henry David Thoreau: Zitate auf Englisch (seite 11)

“Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.”

“In the long run, we only hit what we aim at.”

“The true harvest of my life is intangible - a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched.”

“Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.”

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.”

“I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.”

“A gun gives you the body, not the bird.”

“No man ever followed his genius til it misled him.”

“Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.”

“Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.”

“I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.”

“What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.”

“As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.”

“The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?”

“Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.”

“The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.”

“Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”

“A man can suffocate on courtesy.”

“Read not the Times, read the Eternities.”