None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Laws do not inherently create justice, and even good people can contribute to injustice through their adherence to laws.
This quote by Henry David Thoreau emphasizes the idea that laws alone do not ensure fairness or morality in society. It highlights the potential for individuals, even those with good intentions, to perpetuate injustice simply by following rules without questioning their moral implications. Thoreau encourages a deeper reflection on the relationship between law and justice, suggesting that true justice arises from individual conscience rather than blind compliance with societal rules.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on civil disobedience during a philosophy class.
More from Henry David Thoreau
All quotes βThrough 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
Similar quotes
Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young.
Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person's mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.
The soul of man, left to its own natural level, is a potentially lucid crystal left in darkness. It is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside and above itself. But when the light shines in it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and seems to lose its nature in the splendor of a higher nature, the nature of the light that is in it.
I don't believe in an afterlife but I still fully expect to see my brother again.
Sometimes, when she's out here alone, she can feel the pulse of something bigger, as if all things animate were beating in unison, a glory and a connection that sweeps her out of herself, out of her consciousness, so that nothing has a name, not in Latin, not in English, not in any known language.
I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.