None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Henry David ThoreauRead
Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote criticizes the lack of initiative and belief in people, suggesting they live mundane lives dictated by commercial activities.
Henry David Thoreau's quote reflects on how many individuals lead unfulfilled lives, constrained by their lack of ambition and belief in greater possibilities. It suggests that people often become consumed by material pursuits—buying, selling, and spending—turning them into 'servants' of society rather than taking charge of their destinies through enterprise and faith in themselves.
Themes
EnterpriseFaithAmbitionLifeFreedom
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech to inspire young professionals to pursue their dreams.
More from Henry David Thoreau
All quotes →An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.
Henry David ThoreauRead
Have no mean hours, but be grateful for every hour, and accept what it brings. The reality will make any sincere record respectable.
Henry David ThoreauRead
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.
Henry David ThoreauRead
That grand old poem called Winter
Henry David ThoreauRead
Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?
Henry David ThoreauRead
Similar quotes
That this individual life of all of us is not something limited in its temporal expression to the life that now we experience, follows from the very fact that here nothing final or individual is found expressed.
Josiah RoyceRead
A sudden bold and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open.
Francis BaconRead
When humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever seen before in the primate world.
Robert SapolskyRead
In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.
Leo RostenRead
The primary function of government is to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority of the poor.
James MadisonRead
Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.
Marcus Tullius CiceroRead