"I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain."
— Louisa May Alcott (Work: A Story of Experience)

"The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake. "
— Victor Hugo

"No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come."
— Victor Hugo

"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent"
— Victor Hugo

"Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something."
— Henry David Thoreau

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden: Or, Life in the Woods)

"Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the inheritance of generations and nations."
— Henry David Thoreau

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."
— Henry David Thoreau (Civil Disobedience and Other Essays: Collected Essays of Henry David Thoreau)