Tayylor > Tayylor's Quotes

“And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,
The self-sufficing power of solitude.”
― William Wordsworth, The Prelude

“The earth was all before me. With a heart
Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about; and should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way.”
― William Wordsworth, The Prelude

“Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — that is a hermit's judgment: "There is something arbitrary in his stopping here to look back and look around, in his not digging deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it." Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“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

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.”
― 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

“And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, - we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“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 millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?”
― Henry David Thoreau

“No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes: yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Science is generated by and devoted to free inquiry: the idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its merits. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental new insights.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Always having what we want
may not be the best good fortune
Health seems sweetest
after sickness, food
in hunger, goodness
in the wake of evil, and at the end
of daylong labor sleep.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“Even what those with the greatest reputation for knowing it all claim to understand and defend are but opinions.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“Applicants for wisdom
do what I have done:
inquire within”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“Things keep their secrets.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“Dogs, by this same logic, bark at what they cannot understand.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments