When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat.
Henry David ThoreauBut man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little have been tried.
Henry David ThoreauIf the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.
Henry David ThoreauWhat stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and sublimest truth?
Henry David ThoreauThe New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality; the best of the Hindoo Scripture, for its pure intellectuality. The readeris nowhere raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagvat-Geeta.... It is unquestionably one of the noblest and most sacred scriptures which have come down to us.
Henry David Thoreau