Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.
Interpretation
Be generous and kind, but stand firm and defend your rights when necessary.
Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of being generous and benevolent like the sun and the sea, which provide for others without expectation. However, he also stresses that one must be ready to fiercely defend their own rights if they are threatened, illustrating the balance between kindness and self-assertion.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of compassion and personal rights.
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?
Be flexible, but stick to your principles.
The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.
This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.
Things are always better in the morning.
A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.
No man is able to make progress when he is wavering between opposite things.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.