A Quote by Henry David Thoreau

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Henry David Thoreau

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

I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving.

Henry David Thoreau

None has more frequent conversations with a disagreeable self than the man of pleasure; his enthusiasms are but few and transient; his appetites, like angry creditors, are continually making fruitless demands for what he is unable to pay; and the greater his former pleasures, the more strong his regret, the more impatient his expectations. A life of pleasure is, therefore, the most unpleasing life.

James Goldsmith

When the sacredness of one's word is matched in the attributes of his character throughout, all that constitutes a man, then we find that there is something in a man's life greater than his occupation or his achievements; grander than acquisition or wealth; higher than genius; more enduring than fame.

Orison Swett Marden

I just want people to recognize my father as an artist who was way ahead of his time. He was a genius. His life just burnt out quicker than it should have. And that is unfortunate, but what is more unfortunate is that everybody focuses on the nature of his death as opposed to the nature of his life, which was so much greater and more important.

Freddie Prinze, Jr.

Man's abiding happiness is not in getting anything but in giving himself up to what is greater than himself, to ideas which are larger than his individual life, the idea of his country, of humanity, of God.

Rabindranath Tagore

The artist finds, that the more he can confine his attention to a particular part of any work, his productions are the more perfect, and grow under his hands in the greater quantities.

Adam Ferguson

The pitch to which he was aroused was tremendous. All the fighting blood of his breed was up in him and surging through him. This was living., though he did not know it. He was realizing his own meaning in the world; he was doing that for which he was made.... He was justifying his existence, than which life can do no greater; for life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.

Jack London

Lincoln-sad, patient, kindly Lincoln, who after bearing upon his weary shoulders for four years a greater burden than that borne by any other man of the nineteenth century laid down his life for the people whom living he had served as well-built upon his early study of the Bible.

Theodore Roosevelt

Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.

Chris Hedges

The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.

Alan Watts

The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.

Soren Kierkegaard

'Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends' (Jn. 15:13). In truth if someone hears an evil saying, that is, one which harms him, and in his turn, he wants to repeat it, he must fight in order not to say it. Or if someone is taken advantage of and he bears it, without retaliation at all, then he is giving his life for his neighbor.

Poemen

In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to others. There is a greater fullness of life about his own existence, and when there is more life in the units there is more in the mass which is composed of them.

John Stuart Mill

I say that no man can be greater than the man who bravely and heroically sacrifices his life for the good of others. No man can be greater than the one who meets death face to face, and yet will not shrink from what he believes to be his highest duty.

Robert Green Ingersoll

It is commonly a dangerous thing for a man to have more sense than his neighbors. Socrates paid for his superiority with his life; and if Aristotle saved his skin, it was by taking to his heels in time.

Christoph Martin Wieland

I feel most assuredly that our Father in heaven is far more interested in a soul-one of his children-than it is possible for an earthly father to be in one of his children. His love for us is greater than can be the love of an earthly parent for his offspring.

Joseph Fielding Smith

A Quote by Henry David Thoreau

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