None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Henry David ThoreauRead
If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?
Interpretation
The quote suggests that any work, if it contributes to a greater purpose, is worthy and uplifting.
Henry David Thoreau's quote emphasizes that the value of our work is determined by its contribution to a higher goal or purpose. When work aligns with a significant end, it transforms into a means of elevation, much like a ladder helps us ascend. This perspective invites us to view even the most humble tasks as essential to personal and collective growth.
In practice
In a speech about community service, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of even small contributions to a greater cause.
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
Man is made or unmade by himself. In the armory of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself. He also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace.
2 p.m. beer nothing matters but flopping on a mattress with cheap dreams and a beer as the leaves die and the horses die and the landladies stare in the halls; brisk the music of pulled shades, a last man's cave in an eternity of swarm and explosion; nothing but the dripping sink, the empty bottle, euphoria, youth fenced in, stabbed and shaven, taught words propped up to die.
Many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and... God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again
Aphrodite-Venus had become not a subject of adoration, but an agent of exploitation. From the moment Christian society perceived sex not as a gift of the goddess but a crime against God himself, women were believed to be the vessels of love's malign power.
The coming of Christ means a denial of what we thought we were. It means destroying the white devil in us. Reconciliation to God means that white people are prepared to deny themselves (whiteness), take up the cross (blackness) and follow Christ (black ghetto).
Death carries off a man busy picking flowers with an besotted mind, like a great flood does a sleeping village.
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