After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined, and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and course. A hard, insensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rock, whose hearts are comparatively soft.—Journal, 15 November 1853
An honest misunderstanding is often the ground of future intercourse.—Journal, 6 March 1841
Ask me for a certain number of dollars if you will, but do not ask me for my afternoons.—Journal, 16 September 1859
Communicating with the villas and hills and forests on either hand, by the glances we sent them, or the echoes we awakened.—Journal, 1837-1847
Do not speak for other men; speak for yourself.—Journal, 25 December 1851
For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life—I wrote this some years ago—that were worth the postage.—Walden
I am glad to hear that any words of mine, though spoken so long ago that I can hardly claim identity with their author, have reached you. It gives me pleasure, because I have therefore reason to suppose that I have uttered what concerns men, and that it is not in vain that man speaks to man. This is the value of literature.—Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 27 March 1848
I am surveying, instead of lecturing, at present. Let me have a skimming from your "pan of unwrinkled cream."—Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 31 December 1856
I had another friend, who, through a slight obtuseness, perchance, did not recognize a fact which the dignity of friendship would by no means allow me to descend so far as to speak of, and yet the inevitable effect of that ignorance was to hold us apart forever.—Journal, 4 March 1856
I had two friends. The one offered me friendship on such terms that I could not accept it, without a sense of degradation.—Journal, 4 March 1856
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