Glenn > Glenn's Quotes

“The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the marketplace.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Think and let think.”
― John Wesley

“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.”
― E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“No two persons ever read the same book.”
― Edmund Wilson

“It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
― Joseph Chilton Pearce

“90% of everything is crap.”
― Theodore Sturgeon

“Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.”
― Dorothy Thompson

“I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shown on the surface of some savage swamp, where the double spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; and now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Direct your eye inward, and you'll find / A thousand regions in your mind / Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be / Expert in home-cosmography”
― Henry David Thoreau

“The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern.”
― Ronald Reagan

“My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Those who abjure violence can only do so by others committing violence on their behalf.”
― George Orwell

“Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”
― Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

“To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“It's a man's business to be what he is, and to be it in style.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“By doubting we are led to enquiry, and by enquiry we discern the truth.”
― Peter Abelard

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack

“You have some queer friends, Dorothy,' she said.

The queerness doesn't matter, so long as they're friends,' was the answer”
― L. Frank Baum, The Road to Oz

“I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious views of anyone.”
― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

“Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.”
― John Derbyshire

“Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind.”
― John Milton, Comus

“The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson