“I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist
Source: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
“It is the nature of the noble and the good and the wise that they impart to us of their nobility and their goodness and their wisdom while they live, making it natural for us to breathe the air they breathe and giving us confidence in our own untested powers. And the same influence in more ethereal fashion they continue to exert after they are gone.”
Section 8 : Suffering and Consolation
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "It is the nature of the noble and the good and the wise that they impart to us of their nobility and their goodness and…" by Felix Adler?
Felix Adler99
German American professor of political and social ethics, r… 1851–1933Related quotes
David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist
How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)
Kingman Brewster, Jr. (1919–1988) American diplomat
On relations between the US and the UK, as quoted in "Kingman Brewster Jr., 69, Ex-Yale President and U.S. Envoy, Dies" in The New York Times (9 November 1988)
Vincent Massey (1887–1967) Governor General of Canada
Address to the Women's Canadian Club, Montreal, Quebec, March 26, 1958
Speaking Of Canada - (1959)
“Just as our soul, being air, constrains us, so breath and air envelops the whole kosmos.”
Anaximenes of Miletus (-585–-525 BC) Ancient Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher
DK 13B2
Parker Palmer (1939) American theologian
Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), p. 52
Ebenezer Kinnersley (1711–1778) American scientist
Advertisement for his Course of Experiments in Electricity, 1751.
Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Speech at Kinnaird Hall, Dundee, Scotland ("Unemployment"), October 10, 1908, in Liberalism and the Social Problem (1909), Churchill, Echo Library (2007), p. 87
Early career years (1898–1929)
Context: What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal? And I avow my faith that we are marching towards better days. Humanity will not be cast down. We are going on swinging bravely forward along the grand high road and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun.
John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America
1963, Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty speech
Context: Continued unrestricted testing by the nuclear powers, joined in time by other nations which may be less adept in limiting pollution, will increasingly contaminate the air that all of us must breathe. Even then, the number of children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs might seem statistically small to some, in comparison with natural health hazards. But this is not a natural health hazard — and it is not a statistical issue. The loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby — who may be born long after we are gone — should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent.