None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Henry David ThoreauRead
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Interpretation
Thoreau expresses the value and comfort he finds in solitude over social company.
In this quote, Henry David Thoreau emphasizes the significance of solitude in one's life. He suggests that while companionship can be enjoyable, it often leads to weariness and distractions. Thoreau argues that solitude is not only a refuge but also a more profound and fulfilling form of companionship. His reflection highlights the importance of self-discovery and personal peace that can be achieved through spending time alone.
In practice
During a motivational speech about the importance of self-reflection and solitude.
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
Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.
Through violence, you may murder the hater, but you do not murder the hate.
Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.
It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
Opinions, like showers, are generated in high places, but they invariably descend into lower ones, and ultimately flow down to the people as rain unto the sea.
This planet has β or rather had β a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time.
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