What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1850
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Quotes
Moderation in all things.
—Terence, 166 BCBeing thus arrived in good harbor, and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stale earth, their proper element.
—William Bradford, 1630What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.
—Frederick Douglass, 1855Most authors seek fame, but I seek for justice—a holier impulse than ever entered into the ambitious struggles of the votaries of that fickle, flirting goddess.
—Davy Crockett, 1834The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1615The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851That obtained in youth may endure like characters engraved in stones.
—Ibn Gabirol, 1040All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
—Havelock Ellis, 1921In time history must become a fairy tale—it will become again what it was in the beginning.
—Novalis, c. 1798I am a man: I consider nothing human alien to me.
—Terence, 163 BCDeath and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891I have been a stranger here in my own land all my life.
—Sophocles, c. 441 BC