The basis of good manners is self-reliance.
Interpretation
Good manners stem from an individual's confidence in themselves.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that true good manners are not merely about following social conventions, but rather about having a strong sense of self-reliance. When individuals believe in their own worth and capabilities, they naturally exhibit respectful behavior towards others, indicating that self-assuredness fosters genuine courtesy and respect in social interactions.
In practice
During a speech about personal development at a leadership conference.
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?
Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.
The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a vehicle which we board or get out of at random. Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse for as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future. Only then β but from that moment on β will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom.
The spirit of man is more important than mere physical strength, and the spiritual fiber of a nation than its wealth.
There is the fear that we shan't prove worthy in the eyes of someone who knows us at least as well as we know ourselves. That is the fear of God. And there is the fear of Man -fear that men won't understand us and we shall be cut of from them.
In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think thatβs just ridiculous. Itβs as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street itβs for a reason.
It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil.
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