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?
I can UNDERSTAND pessimism, but I don't BELIEVE in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical EVIDENCE. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give HOPE, because for hope we don't need certainty, only POSSIBILITY.
My description of wisdom has nothing to do with benevolence and righteousness, it is to do with being wise in one's own virtue, nothing more. My description of being has nothing to do with benevolence and righteousness, it is that one should be led by one's innate nature, nothing more.
The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.
I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.
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