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?
I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.
I don't think there is such a thing as a precise sexual orientation. I think we're all ambiguous sexually.
Truth has been relegated to subjectivity; beauty has been subjugated to the beholder; and as millions are idiotized night after night, a global commune has been constructed with the arts enjoying a totalitarian rule.
Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.
No two men ever judged alike of the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly similar, not only in different men but in the same men at different times.
Feminism involves so much more than gender equality and it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve consciousness of capitalism (I mean the feminism that I relate to, and there are multiple feminisms, right). So it has to involve a consciousness of capitalism and racism and colonialism and post-colonialities, and ability and more genders than we can even imagine and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name.
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