A Quote by Henry David Thoreau

One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.

Henry David Thoreau

Quote Topics

Absolute Almost Anything Doubt Learned Living Man May Value Wisest Wisest Man

Quote Author

Henry David Thoreau
American - Author
July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862

Living with doubt ... is almost always more profitable than living with certainty. People don't like doubt, so they pay money and give up opportunities to avoid it. Entrepreneurshi p is largely about living with doubt. If you need reassurance, you're giving up quite a bit to get it. On the other hand, if you can get in the habit of seeking out uncertainty, you'll have developed a great instinct.

Seth Godin

To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self esteem, is capable of love - because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed value. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone

Ayn Rand

To be different is to have value. In this sense all things have equal, absolute value. Each thing has absolute value and thus is equal to everything else.

Shunryu Suzuki

The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favor of its truth. I'm not contending in a dogmatic way that there is not a God. What I'm contending is that we don't know that there is. I don't like the word "absolute." I don't think there is anything absolute whatever. The moral law, for example, is always changing. At one period in the development of the human race, almost everybody thought cannibalism was a duty.

Bertrand Russell

A self-made man, if he is made at all, has already won the battle of life. . . . he has learned to resist. He has learned the value of money, and how to refuse to spend it. He has learned the value of time, and how the conversion of it into useful things will make of his life something worthwhile. He has learned to say no, to say no at the right time and then to stand by it. Without resistance, and the self-denial which it often imposes, there is no real happiness. In the quest for happiness man must learn that temptation resisted strengthens the mind and the soul.

Alvin R. Dyer

The wisest man may be a blind father.

Jules Verne

Doubt is clearly a value in science. It is important to doubt and that the doubt is not a fearful thing, but a thing of great value.

Richard P. Feynman

Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.

George Bernard Shaw

The wisest man may always learn something from the humblest peasant.

Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

Many may very well continue to ask why more value is placed on technicalities of a law than on a man's flesh and blood life, especially when there is any amount of "doubt" at all regarding his guilt or innocence.

Aberjhani

The wisest and the best of men, nay, the wisest and best of their actions, may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke.

Jane Austen

There is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or other, been taught. Even if we learned nothing-perhaps in particular if we learned nothing-our contribution to the discussion may have a potential value.

Dorothy L. Sayers

If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong. By absolute we mean that which always applies, that which provides a final or ultimate standard. There must be an absolute if there are to be morals, and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values. If there is no absolute beyond man's ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.

Francis Schaeffer

Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so, doubt has nothing to do with any serious business. But do not make believe; if pedantry has not eaten all the reality out of you, recognize, as you must, that there is much that you do not doubt, in the least. Now that which you do not at all doubt, you must and do regard as infallible, absolute truth.