“It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. …We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.”
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Henry David Thoreau 385
1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitio… 1817–1862Related quotes
From Evelyn Underhill Ruysbroeck (1915), p171
The Sparkling Stone (c. 1340)
“The song within your heart could never rise
Until love bade it spread its wings and soar.”
Main Street and Other Poems (1917), In Memory
“That's the nature of women … not to love when we love them, and to love when we love them not.”
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book III, Ch. 6.
“The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven, The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit..”
Choruses from The Rock (1934)
Context: The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
A Magazine of People and Possibilities interview (1998)
Canto X, lines 121–129 (tr. Mandelbaum).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Purgatorio
Context: O Christians, arrogant, exhausted, wretched,
Whose intellects are sick and cannot see,
Who place your confidence in backward steps,
Do you not know that we are worms and born
To form the angelic butterfly that soars,
Without defenses, to confront His judgment?
Why does your mind presume to flight when you
Are still like the imperfect grub, the worm
Before it has attained its final form?
"In Search of a Majority: An Address" (Feb 1960); reprinted in Baldwin, "Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobody_Knows_My_Name (1961)