top of page
.png){kind=small}
"The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Critique quotes
"Miracles focused gospel teaches us to be selfish and egocentric."
"Oh, mankind, race of crocodiles! How well I recognize you down there, and how worthy you are of yourselves!"
"If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate -- which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods. None of this is so important, to be sure. The world can get by nicely without literature. But without human beings it can get by better yet."
"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."
"If the self-help books worked, it would be a shrinking industry not a growing one."
"Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity."
"God of blind believers is most likely to be cock-eyed."
Explore more quotes by Henry David Thoreau
"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."
"There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life."
"How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."
bottom of page