None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Henry David ThoreauRead
Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction - a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse.
Interpretation
Strive for excellence in your work so that it brings you satisfaction and pride.
This quote by Henry David Thoreau emphasizes the importance of commitment and diligence in one's work. It suggests that one should approach their tasks with sincerity and care, ensuring that they feel a sense of pride and fulfillment in what they have accomplished, even to the point of reflecting on it during moments of rest.
In practice
During a motivational speech discussing work ethics.
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 passage of time will usually extract the venom of most things and render them harmless
Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be.
The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.
In a life and death struggle, we cannot afford to leave our destinies in the hands of failures.
Look round the habitable world, how few Know their own good, or, knowing it, pursue!
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