Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?
Interpretation
A life with fewer desires leads to greater self-sufficiency and elegance.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that true elegance comes from simplicity and self-sufficiency. By minimizing our wants and needs, we can cultivate a more refined existence, free from the distractions and complications that arise from excessive desires. In essence, it promotes the idea that personal fulfillment and grace come from within, rather than from external possessions or validations.
In practice
In a speech focusing on minimalism and self-sufficiency.
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?
Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on.
Consider no one a stranger. Learn to feel that everybody is akin to you.
The final war will be between Pavlov's dog and Schoedinger's Cat.
Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay.
Dear friends, let us not forget the flesh of Christ which is in the flesh of refugees: their flesh is the flesh of Christ. It is also your task to direct all the institutions working in the area of forced migration to new forms of co-responsibility. This phenomenon is unfortunately constantly spreading. Hence your task is increasingly demanding in order to promote tangible responses of closeness, journeying with people, taking into account the different local backgrounds.
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