Quotes About Author

What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast?

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement.

our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them; and the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves.

It is remarkable that such delicate flowers should here adorn these wilderness paths.

Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house

mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.

Religion is the Venereal Disease of Mankind.

Reader, I think proper, before we proceed any further together, to acquaint thee that I intend to digress, through this whole history, as often as I see occasion, of which I am myself a better judge than any pitiful critic whatever.

fortune, who is a tender parent, and often doth more for her favourite offspring than either they deserve or wish

human nature, though here collected under one general name, is such prodigious variety, that a cook will have sooner gone through all the several species of animal and vegetable food in the world, than an author will be able to exhaust so extensive a subject.

truth distinguishes our writings from those idle romances which are filled with monsters, the productions, not of nature, but of distempered brains;

even I myself, who am not remarkably liable to be captivated with show, have yielded not a little to the impressions of much preceding state.

as she kept one maid-servant, she always took care to chuse her out of that order of females whose faces are taken as a kind of security for their virtue;

there is no one circumstance in which the distempers of the mind bear a more exact analogy to those which are called bodily, than that aptness which both have to a relapse.

So inconsiderable an object is misery to light minds when it is at any distance.

To these encroachments, time and ignorance, the two great supporters of imposture, gave authority;

The extremes of grief and joy have been remarked to produce very similar effects; and when either of these rushes on us by surprize, it is apt to create such a total perturbation and confusion, that we are often thereby deprived of the use of all our faculties.

Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.

She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.

There was nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I must stay.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

They are hopelessly vulgar. Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being 'bad' is a question for the metaphysicians. They are bad enough to dislike, at any rate; and for this short life that is quite enough.

She couldn't have told you whether it was because she was afraid, or because such a voice in the darkness seemed of necessity a boon; but she listened to him as she had never listened before; his words dropped deep into her soul.

Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.