We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them
Interpretation
Life is about navigating the superficial aspects while maintaining depth and grace.
Ralph Waldo Emersonβs quote suggests that our existence is largely focused on the layers that we present to the world, or the 'surfaces'. The true skill lies in how well we can maneuver through these external appearances, blending authenticity and finesse in our interactions and experiences.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth and authenticity.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
If we are made in some degree for others, yet in a greater are we made for ourselves. It were contrary to feeling and indeed ridiculous to suppose that a man had less rights in himself than one of his neighbors, or indeed all of them put together. This would be slavery, and not that liberty which the bill of rights has made inviolable, and for the preservation of which our government has been charged.
We are a dreadful species indeed, and deserve whatever it is our techno-baubles do to us.
The need to leave a legacy is our spiritual need to have a sense of meaning, purpose, personal congruence, and contribution.
An artist has an obligation to tell the truth. [...] that the true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves. We are the monsters. (And the heroes too). Each of us has within himself the capacity for great good, and great evil.
Politics are not the task of a Christian.
... he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.