None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Henry David ThoreauRead
The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.
Interpretation
Our words often fail to capture the true essence of our thoughts and feelings.
Henry David Thoreau highlights the limitations of language in conveying truth. He suggests that the volatility of our words may often reveal their inadequacy, indicating that words alone may struggle to fully express the complexity and depth of our thoughts, experiences, and emotions.
In practice
In a speech about the limitations of communication during a workshop.
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 internal effects of a mutable policy poisons the blessings of liberty itself.
The enduring lesson is war is a disaster. Whoever wins, tremendous loss of life, property - a set back for civilisation.
The kingly office is entitled to no respect. It was originally procured by the highwayman's methods. It remains a perpetuated crime, can never be anything but the symbol of a crime. It is no more entitled to respect than is the flag of a pirate.
Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
Today, as always, the people, no less than the courts, must remain vigilant to preserve the principals of our Bill of Rights, lest in our desire to be secure we lose our ability to be free.
We should every night call ourselves to an account: What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed! What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired?
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