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?
Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.
Grant me an old man's frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.
And our wise Father in heaven knows when we're going to need things too. Don't run out ahead of Him.
See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass.
Knowledge is a sacred cow, and my problem will be how we can milk her while keeping clear of her horns.
What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary error is often more earnest than truth.
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