Henry David Thoreau Quotes

There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.

I've decided that I am totally against jewelry. So I have all fake. There's no reason to have real diamonds. People think it's real anyway.

I have a private press. I'm a book artist. I publish books of other authors and artists. I do the illustrating. I set the type. I print it myself on my press. I do everything but bind it.

The trappings of lifestyle are often that; traps.

This age thinks better of a gilded fool Than of a threadbare saint in wisdom's school.

I do this work, but I am uncomfortable in situations where you're hyped into something you're not. Just because you're in a long limo doesn't mean anything.

There is none who does not lie hourly in the respect he pays to false appearance.

I had a dream I could buy my way to heaven, when I awoke, I spent that on a NECKLACE.

Paperbacks weren't considered real books in the book trade. Up till then it was just murder mysteries, potboilers, 25-cent pocket books sold in newsstands. When the New York publishers started publishing quality paperbacks, there was no place to buy them.

They lie deadly that tell you have good faces.

Thus 'tis with all; their chief and constant care Is to seem everything but what they are.

Pretences go a great way with men that take fair words and magisterial looks for current payment.

Yet I'm making a book and I'm going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won't believe in it and it won't be real to me until there's a finished book I can hold.

Screw reality. It don’t feed my dog. It don’t make my Porsche payments. It don’t get me laid. Bullshit does that…and I like it that way. (Leo)

All, as they say, that glitters is not gold.

Dreck is dreck and no amount of fancy polish is going to make it anything else.

Our age is very cheap and intelligible. Unroof any house, and you shall find it. The well-being consists in having a sufficiency of coffee and toast, with a daily newspaper; a well glazed parlor, with marbles, mirrors and centre-table; and the excitement of a few parties and a few rides in a year.

...If our houses, or clothes, our household furniture and utensils are not works of art, they are either wretched makeshifts, or, what is worse, degrading shams of better things.

When he admitted this to me, I found myself almost annoyed. It was as if he'd hidden this part of himself in order to deceive me, pretending-- as do many people I've discovered--to be what he is not. No one I've ever known is what he appears to be on the surface.

Had he been willing to live a hypocrite, he would have been respectable, he at least could have died surrounded by other hypocrites, and at his death there would have been an imposing funeral, with miles of carriages, filled with hypocrites, and above his hypocritical dust there would have been a hypocritical monument covered with lies.

Boasting, like gilded armour, is very different inside from outside.

It's a Barnum and Bailey world, Just as phony as it can be...

Weakness ineffectually seeks to disguise itself,--like a drunken man trying to show how sober he is.