Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Latin
-
The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river.... The word is from the Latin villa, which together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried.... Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without traveling themselves.
→ -
What a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of Ossian, and that of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare and Milton, much more of Dryden, and Pope, and Gray! Our summer of English poetry, like the Greek and Latin before it, seems well advanced towards its fall, and laden with the fruit and foliage of the season, with bright autumnal tints, but soon the winter will scatter its myriad clustering and shading leaves, and leave only a few desolate and fibrous boughs to sustain the snow and rime, and creak in the blasts of age.
→ -
It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard.
→
Related Authors
-
Mahatma Gandhi Civil rights leader -
Mark Twain Author -
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essayist -
John Muir Author -
Friedrich Nietzsche Philologist -
Louisa May Alcott Novelist -
Edgar Allan Poe Author -
Herman Melville Novelist -
Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil rights activist -
Christopher McCandless Adventurer -
Margaret Fuller Journalist -
Arthur Schopenhauer Philosopher -
Jean-Jacques Rousseau Philosopher -
Harriet Beecher Stowe Author -
Aldo Leopold Author -
Jack London Author -
Walt Whitman Poet -
Abraham Lincoln 16th U.S. President -
Leo Tolstoy Writer -
Nathaniel Hawthorne Novelist