What is threshold?

Famous quotes containing the word threshold:

    I had a good talk with Alcott this afternoon. He is certainly the youngest man of his age we have seen,—just on the threshold of life. When I looked at his gray hairs, his conversation sounded pathetic; but I looked again, and they reminded me of the gray dawn.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    The free man is a warrior.—How is freedom measured among individuals, among peoples? According to the resistance that must be overcome, according to the trouble it takes to stay on top. The highest type of free man must be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps away from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

    I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.
    Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)