None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Henry David ThoreauRead
All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.
Interpretation
Everyone shares a common human experience, regardless of age or status.
Henry David Thoreau's quote reflects on the innate childlike qualities present in all humans, suggesting that no matter how different we may seem, we are connected through our fundamental experiences in life. The 'tale' symbolizes the stories and experiences that unite us, highlighting the shared nature of our existence and the cyclical nature of life, where we all begin and end each day in similar ways.
In practice
In a discussion about human connection at a community gathering.
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
A few hours of mountain climbing make a blackguard and a saint two rather similar creatures.
'Pretty' is most often synonymous with being thin, white, able-bodied, and cis, and the closer you are to those ideals, the more often you will be labeled pretty - and benefit from that prettiness.
If any one idea can justly be called the American idea, it is that a child's circumstances at birth should not determine the station in life that that child will occupy as an adult.
If you know that life is basically going to be horrendously difficult, at best, and all but unlivable at worst, or possibly even unlivable, do you go on? And the choice to go on is the only thing that I think can be called hope. Because if hope isn't forced to encounter the worst possibility, then it's a lie.
Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.
I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' --or else not.
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