Quote #159
The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity, when contrasted with a finer intelligence.
More from Henry David Thoreau
- With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan, - mere Jonathans. We are provincial, bec…
- Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.
- Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be bo…
- What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that, practically, I have never fairly recognized that it co…
- Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the mind …
- Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human socie…
- It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember! If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks…
- Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves, - some…