Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold it's great proportions.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of shaping one's life according to personal ideals and visions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson encourages individuals to take an active role in shaping their own realities. By aligning your actions and thoughts with your true ideals, you can bring about significant changes and achieve greatness in your life. This idea speaks to the power of intention and the ability to cultivate a fulfilling existence through personal conviction and creativity.
In practice
This quote can be a great opener at a motivational workshop.
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?
This very moment I may, if I desire, become the friend of God.
If there is an ‘overabundance’ of an idea in the absence of direct governmental action - which there well might be when compared with some ideal state of public debate - then action disfavoring that idea might ‘un-skew,’ rather than skew, public discourse.
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
From time to time it's fun to close our eyes, and in that dark say to ourselves, 'I am the sorcerer, and when I open my eyes I shall see a world that I have created, and for which I and only I am completely responsible.' Slowly then, eyelids open like curtains lifting stage-center. And sure enough, there's our world, just the way we've built it.
All sins are attempts to fill voids.
I am struck here by the curious mixture of justice and injustice in our lives. We are blamed for our real faults but usually not on the right occasions.
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