None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Henry David ThoreauRead
Every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition, has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food
Interpretation
Thoreau suggests that those dedicated to cultivating their artistic and spiritual selves often avoid consuming meat.
In this quote, Thoreau conveys the idea that individuals who are truly committed to nurturing their higher sensibilities, such as creativity and spirituality, tend to refrain from eating animal products. He associates a vegetarian lifestyle with a deeper engagement in the poetic and thoughtful aspects of life, implying that such choices can enhance one's connection to higher ideals and foster a more profound existence.
In practice
During discussions on dietary choices at a wellness retreat.
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
The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance.
The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.
Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.
It doesn't matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether I'm a woman or a man.
If we were to drive out the English with the weapons with which they enslaved us, our slavery would still be with us even when they have gone.
Spiritual power is a force which history clearly teaches has been the greatest force in the development of men. Ye. we have been merely playing with it and never have really studied it as we have the physical forces. Some day people will learn that material things do not bring happiness, and are of little use in making people creative and powerful. Then the scientists of the world will turn their laboratories over to the study of spiritual forces which have hardly been scratched.
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