Gerald > Gerald's Quotes

“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“The truth is the light and the light is the truth.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“They could laugh at him but they couldn't ignore him”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“When we are dreaming alone it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality.”
― Dom Helder Camara

“Without justice and love, peace will always be a great illusion.”
― Dom Helder Camara

“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

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”
― Henry David Thoreau

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

“Things do not change; we change.”
― henry david thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside.”
― Sri Ramana Maharshi