Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Well-written words are music.

Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.

Every kind of writing is hypocritical.

I started then to try and shape something rather than just express it and when I started to shape something and to imitate other poems that were written by other people, when I had tried to integrate my reading and my writing I was on my path.

Yeah, right. I don’t believe that one for a minute. What do you think? I fell off a turnip truck? (Simone) Honestly? All I was thinking about was how beautiful you are. How much I wanted to feel your skin against mine and how I’ve never been this attracted to a woman before. (Xypher)

Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search... for the sentence in which every word is unalterable.

No, Elenore's something else. You're beautiful. Especially when you look at me with that 'boy he's a condescending asshole' expression....Yea. Beautiful.

Speaking is a beautiful folly; with that man dances over all things.

The work of John Lennon was marked by its exquisite beauty and by its brutal honesty.

Writing is seduction.

All the fun is in how you say a thing.

And yet--it is not beauty that inspires the deepest passion. Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. Beauty, without expression, tires.

Don't be afraid to borrow if someone else has said it well. Winston Churchill said, The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it and ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. That's so well said. You could stay up all night and not think of that.

Though old the thought and oft exprest, Tis his at last who says it best.

Observe, don't imitate.

I treat people who write me the way my friends and I all treat each other when we go to each other for advice, which is sometimes with supreme cruelty. I think that's what helps the advice sink in. If somebody comes at you with both barrels, the first shot opens your head, and the second shot allows the advice to get lodged inside.

Truth is poetry; it is the grandest poetry.

Write the way you talk. Naturally.

Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.

Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.

People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.

It ain't whatcha write, it's the way atcha write it.

The less there is of eloquence, the more there is of love.