Philanthropy is.. . greatly overrated. A pain in the gut is not sympathy for the underprivileged, but the result of eating a green apple; the philanthropist gives to ease his own pain.

Henry David Thoreau
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure.... - Graham Greene

  2. Because it's much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine. - Woody Allen

  3. A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight andunderstanding. - Marshall McLuhan

  4. Those who understand will understand. - Wayne Gerard Trotman

  5. Seeing your own smallness is called insight Honoring your own tenderness is called strength - Jonathan Star

More Quotes By Henry David Thoreau
  1. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed...

  2. I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours..

  3. The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

  4. It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always.

  5. 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.

Related Topics