"I perceive that we inhabitants of New..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau

“Are not all finite beings better pleased with motions relative than absolute?”

“The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.”

“When the true criminals are running around free, the only honorable place for a decent human being is in prisons.”

“And the same things look bent and straight when seen in water and out of it, and also both concave and convex, due to the sight's being mislead by the colors, and every sort of confusion of this kind is plainly in our soul. And, then, it is because they take advantage of this affection in our nature that shadow painting, and puppeteering, and many other tricks of the kind fall nothing short of wizardry.”

“All people have three characters, that which they exhibit, that which they have, and that which they think they have.”

“Time. It hangs heavy for the bored, eludes the busy, flies by the for young, and runs out for the aged.”

“Nothing not built with hands of course is sacred.But here is not a question of what's sacred;Rather of what to face or run away from.I'd hate to be a runaway from nature.”

“Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.”

“I always see those of whom I have heard well with a slight disappointment. They are so much better than the great herd, and yet the heavens are not shivered into diamonds over their heads.”