Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Dreams, ‘The Touchstones of Our Characters’)

“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. We are scarcely less afflicted when we remember some unworthiness in our conduct in a dream, than if it had been actual, and the intensity of our grief, which is our atonement, measures inversely the degree by which this is separated from an actual unworthiness. For in dreams we but act a part which must have been learned and rehearsed in our waking hours, and no doubt could discover some waking consent thereto. If this meanness has not its foundation in us, why are we grieved at it?” — American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)