None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Henry David ThoreauRead
Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye.
Interpretation
Wild apples may seem imperfect, yet they possess unique beauty.
In this quote, Thoreau reflects on the inherent beauty found in wild apples, emphasizing that even those that look rough or imperfect, often described as 'gnarly and crabbed', have redeeming qualities. This serves as a metaphor for appreciating the uniqueness and charm in nature and perhaps in life itself, suggesting that flaws can enhance beauty rather than detract from it.
In practice
In a speech about embracing diversity, one could use this quote to illustrate how differences contribute to beauty.
None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.
An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.
Have no mean hours, but be grateful for every hour, and accept what it brings. The reality will make any sincere record respectable.
As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.
That grand old poem called Winter
It is a general rule of human nature that people despise those who treat them well, and look up to those who make no concessions.
The visible imperfections of hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both.
Geology, perhaps more than any other department of natural philosophy, is a science of contemplation. It requires no experience or complicated apparatus, no minute processes upon the unknown processes of matter. It demands only an enquiring mind and senses alive to the facts almost everywhere presented in nature. And as it may be acquired without much difficulty, so it may be improved without much painful exertion.
Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
Who says that fictions only and false hair_x000D_ Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?_x000D_ Is all good structure in a winding stair?
To produce a really good biological theory one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms lying beneath them, realizing that they are likely to be overlaid by other, secondary mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could only build on what was already there.
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