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?
In a world of commoditized knowledge, the returns go to the companies who can produce non-standard knowledge.
Ultimate freedom is a man's right to choose his attitude.
I am the slave of an internal power more powerful than my education.
Remember: your bosses prefer to keep you in dependent positions. It is in their interest that you do not become self-reliant, and so they will tend to hoard information. You must secretly work against this and seize this information for yourself.
The non-doing of any evil,_x000D_ the performance of what's skillful,_x000D_ the cleansing of one's own mind:_x000D_ this is the teaching of the Awakened.
When I had nothing more to lose, I was given everything. When I ceased to be who I am, I found myself. When I experienced humiliation and yet kept on walking, I understood that I was free to choose my destiny.
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