"Improve every opportunity to be melancholy...." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau

“Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.”

“There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it.”

“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit ~ not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviæ from their graves ... You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into.”

“I have shed pewter tears! It is too melancholy! Rather let me go to the wars and lose arms and legs! It would at least be a change. I cannot bear it longer! Now, I know what it is to have a visit from one's old thoughts, with what they may bring with them! I have had a visit from mine, and you may be sure it is no pleasant thing in the end; I was at last about to jump down from the drawers.”

“Because of something told under the famished hornOf the hunter's moon, that hung between the night and the day,To dream of women whose beauty was folded in dismay,Even in an old story, is a burden not to be borne.”

“There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.”

“Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.”

“The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.”

“But I love you, sir:And when a woman says she loves a man,The man must hear her, though he love her not.”