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?
It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events.
God's word is always effective and produces whatever it expresses. My words, on the contrary, cannot create anything; I can only change what already is into something else.
The merry-go-round was running, yes, but... It was running backward. The small calliope inside the carousel machinery rattle-snapped its nervous-stallion shivering drums, clashed its harvest-moon cymbals, toothed its castanets, and throatily choked and sobbed its reeds, whistles, and baroque flutes.
I do think the patriotic thing to do is to critique my country. How else do you make a country better but by pointing out its flaws?
We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much-vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?
It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn.
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