Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.
9
Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.
7
When a man says to me, “I have'the intensest love of nature,” at once I know that he has none.
4
Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements?
4
Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them.
4
Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends.
5
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
4
How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew!
5
The peace of nature and of the innocent creatures of God seems to be secure and deep, only so long as the presence of man and his restless and unquiet spirit are not there to trouble its sanctity.
9
Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
8
To wish the greatness of our own country is often to wish evil to our neighbors. He who could bring himself to wish that his country should always remain as it is, would be a citizen of the universe.
5
Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.
6
All nations have present, or past, or future reasons for thinking themselves incomparable.
8
Growing nations should remember that, in nature, no tree, though placed in the best conditions of light, soil, and plot, can continue to grow and spread indefinitely.
9
For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation.
10
Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.
5
The driving force of a nation lies in its spiritual purpose, made effective by free, tolerant but unremitting national will.
7
A nation usually renews its youth on a political sick-bed, and there finds again the spirit which it had gradually lost in seeking and maintaining power.
5
A nation may be said to consist of its territory, its people, and its laws. The territory is the only part which is of certain durability.
5
We must recognize that every nation determines its policies in terms of its own interests.
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A nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future.
6
A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.
6
Every country should realize that its turn at world domination, domination because its rights coincided more or less with the character or progress of the epoch, must terminate with the change brought about by this progress.
15
Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.
8
The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American.
5
There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society.
4
Minds that have nothing to confer / Find little to perceive.
12
A nation will not count the sacrifice it makes, if it supposes it is engaged in a struggle for its fame, its influence and its existence.
9
Narrow / The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, /The life that wears, the spirit that creates / One object, and one form, and builds thereby / A sepulchre for its eternity.
11
It is with narrow-souled people as with narrownecked bottles: the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out.
9
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.
11
Blessed is the satirist; and blessed the ironist; blessed the witty scoffer, and blessed the sentimentalist; for each, having seen one spoke of the wheel, thinks to have seen all, and is content.
6
It still may take some explaining, but many more women are keeping their birth names (and not calling them maiden names, with all the sexual double standard that implies).
6
Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.
6
For every man there is something in the vocabulary that would stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it.
6
They fall for the latest isms gullibly as pups for rubber bones.
8
The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy, of its malice.
8
I like peasants—they are not sophisticated enough to reason speciously.
13
When myth meets myth, the collision is very real.
10
The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.
7
The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.
7
Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
10
Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.
8
Without mysticism man can achieve nothing great.
8
Accordion, n. An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.
7
Muzak pervades Las Vegas from the time you walk into the airport upon landing to the last time you leave the casinos.
4
I mean jazz. 1 don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-way-twice music the American black people gave the world.
9
The harmony of a concert, to which you listen with delight, must have on certain classes of minute animals the effect of terrible thunder; perhaps it kills them.
6