Category: Thought

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913).

Someone can conquer kingdoms and countries without being a hero; someone else can prove himself a hero by controlling his temper. Someone can display courage by doing the out-of-the-ordinary, another by doing the ordinary. The question is always — how does he do it?

Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (1843).

Whoever undertakes to rule the kingdom and to shape it according to his whim — I foresee that he will fail to reach his goal. That is all.

The kingdom is a living being. It cannot be constructed, in truth! He who tries to manipulate it will spoil it, he who tries to put it under his power will lose it.

Therefore: Some creatures go out in front, others follow, some have warm breath, others cold, some are strong, some weak, some attain abundance, other succumb.

The wise man will accordingly forswear excess, he will avoid arrogance and not overreach.

Lao Tzu, as quoted in the second of the Six Pamphlets of the “White Rose” Students

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

Henry David Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854).

Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘the Symphony.’ The rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine his value as a composer. He was divinely conscious of the enthusiasm of Nature, the emotion of her rhythms and the harmony of her solitude.

Charles Ives, on Henry David Thoreau [pictured], Essays Before a Sonata (1920).

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

Henry David Thoreau, Letter to Harrison Blake (November 16, 1857).

[T]he message of Thoreau, though his fervency may be inconstant and his human appeal not always direct, is, both in thought and spirit, as universal as that of any man who ever wrote or sang — as universal as it is nontemporaneous — as universal as it is free from the measure of history, as ‘solitude is free from the measure of the miles of space that intervene between man and his fellows.’ In spite of the fact that Henry James (who knows almost everything) says that ‘Thoreau is more than provincial — that he is parochial,’ let us repeat that Henry Thoreau, in respect to thought, sentiment, imagination, and soul, in respect to every element except that of place of physical being — a thing that means so much to some — is as universal as any personality in literature. That he said upon being shown a specimen grass from Iceland that the same species could be found in Concord is evidence of his universality, not of his parochialism. He was so universal that he did not need to travel around the world to prove it.

Charles Ives, on Henry David Thoreau [pictured], Essays Before a Sonata (1920).

[A] man’s consent as regards his own actions is the most sacred thing in the world, and the one foundation on which all human relations must be built.

Auberon Herbert (1912).

Man is not a Yahoo, but he is rather like a Yahoo and needs to be reminded of it from time to time.

George Orwell, review of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, in New English Weekly (November 14, 1935), referring to the bestial human counterparts to the noble horse creatures, the Houyhnhnms, in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726, 1735).

The American taxpayer has always been deceived: it is his birthright.

Lord Mountjoy, in Mouse on the Moon. The passage in the original Leonard Wibberley novel runs as follows:

The American taxpayer’s government has been deceiving him for years, lending money to South American dictators, for instance, which the taxpayer thought was being spent on South American peasants. Besides, his own Secretary of State agrees with the deceit. He knows that it is good for the American taxpayer. And it is good for him.