A Quote by Henry David Thoreau

Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners?

Henry David Thoreau

Quote Topics

Ambition Amount Equal Hammered Insane Leave Manners Memory Nations Pains Perpetuate Polish Possessed Smooth Stone Taken Themselves Were

Quote Author

Henry David Thoreau
American - Author
July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862

I felt as if we were fighting something worse than Anne, some demon that possessed her, that possessed all of us Boleyns: ambition - the devil that had brought us to this little room and brought my sister to this insane distress and us to this savage battle.

Philippa Gregory

It is quite possible that someone is insane and they think they have a chance. Not insane in the clinical sense, but they may have such a strong political ambition that they blind themselves to reality.

Davy Crockett

I have one vivid memory of one of the days that the marches were taking place. We were in a Catholic, predominantly Polish and Lithuanian neighborhood. Chicago is a place where people define themselves by their parish and by their ethnicity.

Sara Paretsky

Why did Erich von Stronheim leave Germany? Why did Hitchcock leave England? If you were a director you'd like to work in Hollywood too. Now go ahead and ask me if I'm still Polish. You people keep asking me this question. You want Polish artists to make it in the world, but when they do, you accuse them of treason.

Roman Polanski

The object of ambition, unlike that of love, never being wholly possessed, ambition is the more durable passion of the two.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.

E. M. Forster

As much pains were taken to make me idle as were ever taken to make me studious.

William Wilberforce

For my name and memory I leave to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

Francis Bacon

The power which the Hellenes and even the Italians possessed, of civilizing and assimilating to themselves the nations susceptible of culture with whom they came into contact, was wholly wanting in the Phoenicians.

Theodor Mommsen

Great pains were taken to hide chains with flowers

Charlotte Bronte

In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty's Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power. They have given the Polish Government an assurance to this effect. I may add that the French Government have authorized me to make it plain that they stand in the same position in this matter.

Neville Chamberlain

That to this mountain-daisy's self were known The beauty of its star-shaped shadow, thrown On the smooth surface of this naked stone!

William Wordsworth

No one worth possessing Can be quite possessed; Lay that on your heart, My young angry dear; This truth, this hard and precious stone, Lay it on your hot cheek, Let it hide your tear. Hold it like a crystal When you are alone And gaze in the depths of the icy stone. Long, look long and you will be blessed: No one worth possessing Can be quite possessed.

Sara Teasdale

Passion, manners, and 80 ounces of beer will win the heart of any woman. And if it doesn't, you'll be too hammered to remember.

Christopher Titus

If in the past, after every lost war, the unlucky vanquished were divested forever of their honor and their equality of rights, the League of Nations would even now have to be satisfied with a whole series of non-equal and thus ultimately dishonorable and inferior nations.