Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
Interpretation
Create your own guide to life by choosing meaningful words and lessons from your experiences.
Ralph Waldo Emerson encourages individuals to curate their own personal philosophy or belief system by identifying and collecting significant insights and truths that resonate deeply with them. This metaphorical 'Bible' serves as a personal testament of wisdom gleaned from various readings and experiences, emphasizing the importance of self-discovery and individual interpretation of knowledge.
In practice
During a personal development workshop, you could share this quote to encourage participants to reflect on their own guiding principles.
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?
You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That's what I always do.
I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it.
Practice sharing the fullness of your being, your best self, your enthusiasm, your vitality, your spirit, your trust, your openness, above all, your presence. Share it with yourself, with your family, with the world.
The fact that knowledge endlessly recedes as the investigator is about to grasp it is what constitutes at the same time his torment and happiness.
You will fear the darkness only to the extent that you yourself are not providing light.
There has been a great laziness in my soul. Lots of days I could write songs, but I could also take my $400 and play the slot machines at the riverfront casino.
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