None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Henry David ThoreauRead
No human being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the interconnectedness of all living beings and the moral implication of taking a life.
Henry David Thoreau suggests that as individuals grow and mature, they develop a sense of empathy and moral responsibility that prevents them from harming others indiscriminately. Recognizing that all beings share the experience of life leads to a greater respect for existence and an understanding that to take a life is to violate a common bond among living creatures.
In practice
During a speech on environmental ethics, one could use this quote to illustrate the importance of respecting all forms of life.
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
How many times have you tried to solve “the problem”? you’ll be trying to solve it not just until you die but for many more lifetimes. Instead, understand that this world is just the play of the senses. It’s the five khandhas doing their thing; it has nothing to do with you. It’s just people being people, the world being the world.
We’re not Indians and we’re not Native Americans. We’re older than both concepts. We’re the people, we’re the human beings.
Whomever the Lord has adopted and deemed worthy of His fellowship ought to prepare themselves for a hard, toilsome, and unquiet life, crammed with very many and various kinds of evil.
The lawgiver ought to be gentle, lenient and humane. The lawgiver ought to be a skilled architect who raises his building on the foundation of self-love, and the interest of all ought to be the product of the interests of each.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
A swami may conceivably follow only the path of dry reasoning, of cold renunciation; but a yogi engages himself in a definite, step-by-step procedure by which the body and mind are disciplined, and the soul liberated.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.