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?
What an ironic tragedy that an affluent, βChristianβ minority in the world continues to hoard its wealth while hundreds of millions of people hover on the edge of starvation!
The divorce between Church and State ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no Church property anywhere, in any state or in the nation, should be exempt from equal taxation; for if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a tax upon the whole community.
The entire political system is contrary to everything a feminine heart stands for. It lacks inclusion. It lacks tenderness toward children. It lacks honor for relationships. It lacks reverence for the earth. It lacks love. And without those things, the feminine psyche disconnects.
Anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of it, for nothing is made worse or better by praise.
A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.
The sickly, weakly, timid man fears the people, and is a Tory by nature. The healthy, strong and bold cherishes them, and is formed a Whig by nature.
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