Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
Mark TwainRead
I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.
Interpretation
It's challenging to help people achieve their goals if they don't know what those goals are.
Mark Twain highlights the importance of self-awareness and clarity in one's desires. The quote suggests that while guidance and teaching can lead to achieving goals in life, the fundamental obstacle is often a lack of understanding of what those goals should be. Without knowing what one truly wants, any effort to attain something becomes futile.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal development.
Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.
You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.
To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
Use your health while you have it, my dear friend and brother. Do not cast away peculiar opportunities that may never come again. You know not when your last Sabbath with your people may come. Speak for eternity. Above all things, cultivate your own spirit. A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear, and your heart full of God's Spirit, is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin.
Socrates said, our only knowledge was_x000D_ _x000D_ "To know that nothing could be known;" a pleasant_x000D_ _x000D_ Science enough, which levels to an ass_x000D_ _x000D_ Each Man of Wisdom, future, past, or present._x000D_ _x000D_ Newton, (that Proverb of the Mind,) alas!_x000D_ _x000D_ Declared, with all his grand discoveries recent,_x000D_ _x000D_ That he himself felt only "like a youth_x000D_ _x000D_ Picking up shells by the great Ocean-Truth."
Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.
To err is human; to forgive people and yourself for poor behavior is to be sensible and realistic.
Don't talk about it. The rose doesn't have to propagate its perfume. It just gives it forth, and people are drawn to it. Live it, and people will come to see the source of your power.
Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.