💬 Quotes

"No one can tell what will turn up in battle, and an open mind and a spirit of eager adaptation are essential."

"In life, as in football, the principle to follow is: hit the line hard; don't foul and don't shirk, but hit the line hard."

"We drew from the college clubs and from the ranches, from the cities and from the backwoods, and all alike proved to be Americans through and through."

"What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest, and the density of the underwood."

"Talk of a divinity in nature! The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book... but poetry and art do not dwell here."

"It is difficult to conceive any thing so mysterious and terrifying as a primitive forest, where the axe has never laid low the pine, nor the sun let in to thaw the moss."

"We were prepared to find many things anomalous and virgin, but we did not expect to find so complete a removal from all the signs of civilization."

"Here is no flattering Earth, no locality in which you can find a home, but rather a stubborn, and at the same time sublime, indifference to human life."

"The pine tree is as immortal as I am, and half the battle is to know it and to be acquainted with it."

"The state exists to serve man, not man to serve the state. When it forgets this fundamental inversion, rebellion becomes a moral imperative."

"True freedom begins where passive acquiescence ends. To obey unjust laws is to become an accomplice to injustice."

"The history of progress is written in the acts of those who refused to accept the legality of oppression as a definition of justice."

"Violence degrades the oppressor and destroys the humanity of the oppressed; only through peaceful defiance can we redeem both."

"A man's primary allegiance is to his own conscience, not to the shifting expediencies of governments and parliaments."

"The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM."

"The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation."

"Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space."

"A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species... it must be discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part."

"Oftentimes an awakening of a state of mind which had been lain dormant, resembling wonderfully that state of moral transition which the renovator of our being hath so graciously staked out for the very adolescence of our Christianity."

"The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of journeys along the intervening road."