Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

Stuff a cold and starve a cold are but two ways. They are the two practices, both always in full blast. Yet you must take the advice of the one school as if there was no other.

Henry David Thoreau

This fond reiteration of the oldest expressions of truth by the latest posterity, content with slightly and religiously retouchingthe old material, is the most impressive proof of a common humanity.

Henry David Thoreau

As for the tenets of the Brahmans, we are not so much concerned to know what doctrines they held, as that they were held by any. We can tolerate all philosophies.... It is the attitude of these men, more than any communication which they make, that attracts us.

Henry David Thoreau

Here or nowhere is our heaven.

Henry David Thoreau

There are sure to be two prescriptions diametrically opposite.

Henry David Thoreau

Only lovers know the value and magnanimity of truth.

Henry David Thoreau

If there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveler always has a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there.

Henry David Thoreau

Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp's rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,--a Sharp's rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.

Henry David Thoreau

There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.

Henry David Thoreau

Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard.

Henry David Thoreau

You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally, the stuttering, blunderingclod-hopper that I am. Even poetry, you know, is in one sense an infinite brag and exaggeration. Not that I do not stand on all that I have written,--but what am I to the truth I feebly utter?

Henry David Thoreau

A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

Henry David Thoreau

The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality.

Henry David Thoreau

Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.

Henry David Thoreau

Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Henry David Thoreau

If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

Henry David Thoreau

If we dealt only with the false and dishonest, we should at last forget how to speak truth.

Henry David Thoreau

As the least drop of wine tinges the whole goblet, so the least particle of truth colors our whole life.

Henry David Thoreau

Where there is a lull in truth an institution springs up.

Henry David Thoreau

In all perception of the truth there is a divine ecstasy, an inexpressible delirium of joy, as when a youth embraces his betrothed virgin.

Henry David Thoreau

I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.

Henry David Thoreau

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower into a truth.

Henry David Thoreau

Truth is always paradoxical.

Henry David Thoreau

Men are probably nearer the essential truth in their superstitions than in their science.

Henry David Thoreau

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.

H. L. Mencken

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

H. L. Mencken

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Sacrifice life to truth.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

General abstract truth is the most precious of all blessings; without it, man is blind; it is the eye of reason.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Abstract truth is the eye of reason.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

Jeremy Collier

Truth is the band of union and the basis of human happiness. Without this virtue there is no reliance upon language, no confidence in friendship, no security in promises and oaths.

Jean Shepherd

The truth will always have a market.