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"Philanthropy is. . . greatly overrated. A pain in the gut is not sympathy for the underprivileged, but the result of eating a green apple; the philanthropist gives to ease his own pain."
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Exlpore more Nostalgia quotes

"Sometimes to return is a vulgarity."

"I used to be a poet.My words were traded in marketplaces like pieces of gold.Merchants bought my verses for as much as they paid for saffron and Indian jade.Now I am old...drunk on wine and candle fumes.Alone in this barren room, I speak my psalms to the night air so as to entertain moths before they go off to die.I used to be a poet and my words were gold."

"Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe."

"In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory."

"Yet, when this cherished volume was now placed in my hand-when I turned over its leaves, and sought in its marvellous pictures the charm I had, till now, never failed to find-all was eerie and dreary; the giants were gaunt goblins, the pigmies malevolent and fearful imps, Gulliver a most desolate wanderer in most dread and dangerous regions. I closed the book, which I dared no longer peruse, and put it on the table, beside the untasted tart."

"The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful) the marble-topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed. For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit's foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there."
Explore more quotes by Henry David Thoreau

"There is one consolation in being sick; and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before."

"I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will."

"If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things."

"It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious."

"The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected."

"Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing."
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