Lionel Wolfe > Lionel's Quotes

“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“The moon asked me to meet her in a field tonight. I think she has amorous ideas.”
― Hafiz

“I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.”
― Lord Byron

“I have nothing to declare except my genius.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“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

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman

“If you want to be happy, be.”
― Leo Tolstory

“I don't want to be alone, I want to be left alone.”
― Audrey Hepburn

“Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“We were together. I forget the rest.”
― Walt Whitman

“I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best. ”
― Walt Whitman

“If you done it, it ain't bragging.”
― Walt Whitman

“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Семейное счастие

“He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.”
― leo tolstoy, War and Peace

“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection

“The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light and with a lamp lengthen out the day.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your own clothes.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals

“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

“When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson