Henry David Thoreau Quotes

There aren't a lot of guys out there keeping it real. Everybody's been branded. Everybody's been bought and sold.

The business aspect of this sport is a contradiction to what it's really about, and that's knowing something for what it is and not just what it looks like.

Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious.

Ceremony and great professing renders friendship as much suspect as it does religion.

Religion is a smile on a dog.

Cynicism is carnality that thinks its smart.

The world is grown so full of dissimulation and compliment, that men's words are hardly any signification of their thoughts.

It's funny - people think analysis or psychiatry is mad, and THEY go to CHURCH.

No man is a Christian who cheats his fellows, perverts the truth, or speaks of a "clean bomb" yet he will be the first to make public his faith in God.

I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?

Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.

Personally, I didn't think there was anything wrong with sadness. Just the opposite – hypocrisy made people happy and truth made them sad.

In the light of her son's comment she reconsidered the scene at the mosque, to see whose impression was correct. Yes it could be worked into quite an unpleasant scene. The doctor had begun by bullying her, had said Mrs Callendar was nice, and then - finding the ground safe - had changed; he had alternately whined over his grievances and patronized her, had run a dozen ways in a single sentence, had been unreliable, inquisitive, vain. Yes, it was all true, but how false as a summary of the man; the essential life of him had been slain.

The minister said, “Let us pray,” but as everyone else bowed their head, I could only stare slack-jawed at the sight of Peter Van Houten. After a moment, he whispered, “We gotta fake pray,” and bowed his head.

When a woman starts talking about her duty, her regard for appearances, and her respect for religion, she raises so many bulwarks which she delights to see captured by storm.

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.

We must put up with our clothes as they are - they have their reason for existing. They are on us to expose us - to advertise what we wear them to conceal. They are a sign; a sign of insincerity; a sign of suppressed vanity; a pretense that we desire gorgeous colors and the graces of harmony and form; and we put them on to propagate that lie and back it up.

Honor's a thing too subtle for wisdom; if honor lie in eating, he's right honorable.

Most people love you for who you pretend to be.

No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.

Yes. The way people behave, the paradoxes, the contradictions. All these things we have to live with and still pretend that everything is only black or white. That, I think, is the most interesting thing in human nature. The fact that we have to do one thing and pretend something else. That’s when it becomes very interesting. If you can literally speak the way you feel, then it’s not interesting anymore. It’s when you have to lie that it becomes interesting.

First, whenever a man talks loudly against religion, always suspect that it is not his reason, but his passions, which have got the better of his creed. A bad life and a good belief are disagreeable and troublesome neighbors, and where they separate, depend upon it, 'Tis for no other cause but quietness sake.

Perhaps,” murmured his lordship, “I yielded to a compassionate impulse.” “A what?” gasped his best friend. “Oh, did you think I never did so?” said his lordship, the satirical glint in his eyes extremely pronounced. “You wrong me! I do, sometimes—not frequently, of course, but every now and then!

If I were money-motivated, I would spread insidious lies that marijuana is dangerous and addictive and leads to dancing with white women, that your children are at risk of riding that freight train straight into hell or an opium den. Then I'd parlay that fear into a chain of overpriced "rehab" centers that can cure them and shake Satan from their souls. But I am not that ambitious. I am a drunk.