"Let Harlequin be taken with a fit..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau
Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic, and his trappings will have to serve that mood too.
More by Henry David Thoreau
“The necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things to the scholar is rarely well remembered.”
“I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.”
“The universe is wider than our views of it.”
More on Adaptation
“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
“It is only the very wisest and the very stupidest who never change.”
“When I was a young man, I didn't think about having a family. My wife and I were too poor to have babies. Then all of a sudden, one came along and scared the hell out of us because we had no money. Once the baby arrives, you make do somehow. You fall in love with the baby and life adjusts itself. You find you don't need as much money as you thought. When that happens, you can ask the questions that should have come before the baby.”
More on Circumstance
“The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.”
“The great make its feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions, and subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury; but the higher perceptions find their objects everywhere; only the low habits need palaces and banquets.”
“The circumstances which a man encounters with suffering are the result of his own mental inharmony.”