A Quote by Henry David Thoreau

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. — © Henry David Thoreau
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.
It is a general principle of human nature, that a man will be interested in whatever he possesses, in proportion to the firmness or precariousness of the tenure by which he holds it; will be less attached to what he holds by a momentary or uncertain title, than to what he enjoys by a durable or certain title; and, of course, will be willing to risk more for the sake of the one, than for the sake of the other.
It is a general principle of human nature, that a man will be interested in whatever he possesses, in proportion to the firmness or precariousness of the tenure by which he holds it.
Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational.
Mr. President at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest which extends from mountain to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death.
Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.
You know who has tenure? The pope has tenure. The Queen of England has tenure. So does Fidel and the communists - because they represent the people, of course (scoff). Federal judges have tenure as well - no federal judge has ever successfully been removed. And then there's the college professors. Me. How do you like that?
Just as the plurality of the human soul's life of imagination, feeling, and will has a focus, a center, around which it orders and orientates itself, so also does the multiplicity of the appearances of the world have ONE center, which orders and holds everything together.
What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know the answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it make any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.
Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
A day will come in which men will look upon an animal's murder the same way they look today upon a man's murder.
Present is the reality. The past is finished, and the future doesn't exist. When the Kundalini rises She elongates those thoughts and establishes in the center where there is complete thoughtless awareness. And spiritually you grow in that thoughtless awareness which in Sanskrit we call as Nirvichaar Samadhi.
To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will-to-life. At the same time the man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life as his own. He accepts as being good: to preserve life, to raise to its highest value life which is capable of development; and as being evil: to destroy life, to injure life, to repress life which is capable of development. This is the absolute, fundamental principle of the moral, and it is a necessity of thought.
I never fail to be moved by knowing that the ground on which I walk is layered with the past- with achievement and strife and the repeated passions and conflicts of the human creature, always changing, always the same. Generations passing like grass.
In our case, murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the foetus in the womb, while as yet the human being derives blood from other parts of the body for its sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier mankilling; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to the birth. That is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in the seed.
Whatever was in the human nature of Christ was moved at the bidding of the divine will; yet it does not follow that in Christ there was no movement of the will proper to human nature, for the good wills of other saints are moved by God's will... For although the will cannot be inwardly moved by any creature, yet it can be moved inwardly by God.
The proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator—to enact intellectually, volitionally, and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature. When it does so, it is good and happy.
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