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?
Aphrodite-Venus had become not a subject of adoration, but an agent of exploitation. From the moment Christian society perceived sex not as a gift of the goddess but a crime against God himself, women were believed to be the vessels of love's malign power.
Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one.
The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.
The kingdom is not an exclusive, well-trimmed suburb with snobbish rules about who can live there. No, it is for a larger, homelier, less self-conscious caste of people who understand they are sinners because they have experienced the yaw and pitch of moral struggle.
Amassing of wealth is an opportunity for good deeds, not hubris
I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.
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